Search engine optimization should solve a problem for a business. Ask yourself this question; what would being found well in the search engine results, getting more interested people to become leads, and selling more help you accomplish that you can't do right now? The answer to this question is what search engine optimization is all about. It's about increasing profit and what that profit will do for you as a business owner.
Be aware - local SEO is no longer just about getting your site found online. The Internet is so competitive that you now have to have someone create great marketing messages within your site and in the search results so that searchers on the Internet select your site as the one to visit. When you think about the last search you did online, think about what made you select the site you chose to visit from the search engine rankings. It was most likely the marketing message that appeared in the search rankings.
Once your website has been selected, conversion from site visitor, to lead, to new customer is the goal.
Most Businesses Have Failed With Search Engine Optimization at Least Once.
It’s hard to come to grips with, but the truth is that most business owners have failed in an attempt to use SEO. What’s harder to get your head around is that most have failed four times before finding the right SEO service.
Have you had a bad experience with search engine optimization?
Do you see competitors ranked well online?
Let’s face it; if local SEO works for some competitors and not others, the variable is the SEO company that did the work. So the conclusion is not that SEO doesn’t work, but, more accurately, that one local SEO service is better at raising your SEO score and getting you ranked than another. It's really no different than your industry. Some businesses are really good, competent, and do a great job; some are not.
Not All SEO Services Are Equal
There’s no formal education for search engine optimization. Local SEO is a trial and error business. Until someone has done enough trial and error to understand why optimization is done the way it is done, they are bound to have failures. And, if any SEO specialist does well for a period of time but doesn’t continue to hone their skills, they are destined to (eventually) fail, and so are their clients.
This is why it’s important to find a good SEO firm that can show you significant results.
Talk with the SEO company's clients to find out for yourself the good, the bad, and the ugly about the SEO firm. Find out if the business is found for good terms in the search engine rankings, do they get good traffic, and does that traffic convert to new business. Ask about their customer service experience with the SEO firm. Find out if the team is responsive, and if they bring new ideas to their clients. Make sure that there is a team of SEO specialists working for you, not just a guy in the extra bedroom of his mother’s house. Teams have better success than individuals because more skilled eyes on a project mean fewer mistakes. Make sure the search engine optimization firm understands your business.
These are important questions that will help you uncover the true value of any SEO service.
A Good Search Engine Optimization Company Will Perform These Services For You:
- Understand your goals before optimizing your site
- Structure your site so that it is technically correct
- Research keywords and phrases
- Write excellent content that solves problems for site visitors and establishes you as an expert
- Devise and implement an internal link strategy
- Devise and implement an external link strategy
- Use proper alt tags (alternative text tags)
- Use the correct h tags (header tags)
- Optimize your social media accounts
- Connect your social media accounts to your site
- Set up your blog
- Establish your presence in directories that are applicable to your industry
A great search engine optimization company will do all of the above, and:
- Start with an in-depth marketing call so that they understand your business, your goals, and what you want to achieve as well as you do.
- Perform an in-depth SEO audit of your current site so, they know what needs to be optimized and what already works well. This prevents blind optimization, keyword cannibalization, and the destruction of your current level of success.
- Research your industry, your competitors, and how to beat them online.
- Build the proper SEO strategy that includes all the aspects of digital marketing, so your newfound traffic turns into leads and, ultimately, jobs.
- Initiate conversion rate optimization. This process is designed to convert more site visitors to new customers with the existing traffic and assets that you already have.
- Deep data analysis from all sources – Google Analytics, search console, your CRM, any paid ad platforms that you use, etc., so that they can make suggestions to improve your ROI.
- Include a customer value optimization funnel as part of the site that keeps visitors flowing through the 3 stages of the funnel: awareness, evaluation, and conversion. A good funnel can increase your conversion rate up to 8X.
- Establishes metrics that track the success of the site and the funnel at each stage.
- Analyzes the results to ensure the proper changes are made to the site to improve revenue.
- Uses content marketing to attract new visitors and encourage past visitors to return.
- Creates offers that entice consumers to do business with you.
- Designs calls-to-action to get more visitors to reach out to you.
- Suggests new types of content like videos, podcasts, etc., that will drive traffic and offer valuable information to visitors to help build a high trust factor with them.
- Test offers to help you refine and develop a more profitable strategy.
- And more!
Does Your SEO Company Do These Things For You? Have They Discussed Any of This With You?
If not, you may want to consider a more proactive search engine optimization firm. The Internet changes rapidly, and if you don’t change your SEO strategy and techniques just as rapidly, you fall behind, and competitors beat you to the new business found online.
Have you had the experience of doing well with your SEO firm for a while and then falling off?
This happens because the SEO firm didn’t stay current with the changes that the search engines make. Many sites dropped terribly after the Penguin and Panda algorithm changes that Google implemented. This told us that there were issues with the quality of the content on those sites. I’m happy to tell you that none of our sites dropped as a result of those or any other algorithm changes.
Google Wants Your Content to be Valuable to Site Visitors
They do well when people that search the Internet find good, quality content in the search engine rankings that provides the user with a great experience. They find exactly what they are looking for.
Google ad space is more valuable because of how good their organic search results are, so they are tough about making sure the results are high quality. This is also why it can be hard to get your site ranked well organically without professional search engine optimization help.
Because of the importance of quality content, your SEO service needs to know how to write content and provide what the visitor is really looking for and not talk all about you and how wonderful you are. Only your mother cares about how wonderful you are . . . well maybe your dog does, too.
Great content addresses what the site visitor is looking for, not what the business owner wants them to hear. Site visitors have questions about your services and are seeking answers. Give them the answers, and don’t talk about yourself, and you will be rewarded in the organic search rankings. Talk about how wonderful you are, and you will likely not do as well.
Here's a good article from Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en
Good SEO Really Has to Take into Consideration the User Experience (UX) and the Robot Experience (RX)
The robot is sent from the search engine to understand your website. If the technical structure, the internal linking, or the site's content is not right, the robot will leave the site without a full understanding of what you are trying to accomplish. You’ve accidentally created a roadblock for the robot. If this happens, you are not going to rank well. If other aspects of search engine optimization are missing or done incorrectly, you won’t rank as well as you could if all SEO techniques are done the right way.
You may find that you have a few rankings, but they aren’t the terms that are the money makers in your industry. It’s usually because some of the finer points of a good SEO strategy are missed or misapplied. The user experience refers to the site visitor’s experience. This typically takes the content, navigation, and flow of the site into consideration. If the site is hard to understand or navigate, you are going to lose visitors. Many times, this is indicated by the bounce rate. The bounce rate is determined by measuring the percentage of people that visit one page of your site and leave without doing anything else. This is something that you really want to minimize.
SEO May Seem Like it Should be Very Easy to Perform Well
If you think about the number of businesses vying for those 10 spots on page one of the search engine rankings, you may realize that it’s harder than it looks. Your website has to be better than the best of your competitors to take a spot occupied by another company on page one.
Those sites got to page one because they’re doing something right. If you want to take their spot, you’re going to have to do your SEO better than they do theirs.
This is what we do. We are one of the leading SEO services in the nation. We have helped nearly 1,000 businesses succeed online. Our team is very experienced and understands SEO and Internet marketing better than most. We’re certified in search engine marketing and the other 7 disciplines of digital marketing. This is not to pound our chest, but rather to tell you that we are highly trained, very experienced, and have performed SEO for a ton of business owners just like you.
So, if you would like to improve your online presence and reach more consumers online, increase internet traffic, and convert as many of those visitors to buyers as humanly possible, call us and let’s talk about a serious SEO strategy that will help you win.
We’ll give you a one-on-one workshop with one of our SEO experts, not a salesperson. In that workshop, we’ll develop a plan to help you win online. We’ll tell you what is stopping your website from ranking currently and also share some really good marketing techniques that we use to convert more site visitors to buyers. It doesn’t matter what type of business you own; our search engine optimization service can help you get more leads, more business, and more profit. Call us today!