You have a website. You want that website to rank. You want potential leads to find your website, click on the ‘contact you’ button or sign up for a newsletter and eventually become a customer. But how do they find your website? SEO, search engine optimization, or even a newer term SEM, search engine marketing, is all about taking the website that you have and turning it into a website people love, will click on, and sign up. Designing the website and throwing it out into the interwebs will not get you business. You must market that website just as you would any other business. So, you opened a storefront somewhere. If you’ve opened that store out of the middle of Timbuktu and nobody ever passes and you never have a commercial for it, send out flyers, or advertise it in any way, no one will find it. The same goes for your website.
If it’s simply sitting out there on page 5382 of the Google search engine, no one will come across it and no one will buy your product or service. That’s why search engine optimization is so vital to getting a website found and ultimately getting leads.
I have people calling all the time or emailing us because they want something done to their site, but they don’t know what. They know they need help but have no idea how to get there. That’s understandable. Most people know their job, product or service. They are not proficient in both marketing AND their service or product. It doesn’t mean they can’t be, but it does take time, effort and a lot of research, DAILY.
It also means doing a lot of different things to market your website. You can’t simply blog on the website because then you’re just working in a tunnel. Again, if no one is getting to your site they’re not going to read the fabulous information you are providing. (We still hope you are writing amazing and important content). You can’t simply throw your website out on a few social media sites once every few months.
Search engine optimization comes down to about 50-100 little things are working together to make your website great and found.
You can either do it yourself or you can pay someone to do it for you. You probably know your service, job or product better than an outside marketer, so, the information you want your clients or customers to know about really should be your job. But again, that also takes time. There are ghostwriters and copywriters that write basic content for your website. Personal SEO business does this for a variety of businesses and people. However, we make sure that we are writing legitimate, accurate, authoritative and important information for whomever we are writing for. If you choose to create your own content, a marketing company (Personal SEO) can promote that content for you.
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is hiring a company that does not write legitimate content. If you are paying a company that outsources their material to a different country that doesn’t even speak your language, you’re going to have a lot of grammatical and spelling errors and it’s just not going to read correctly. Plus, they not even provide accurate information for your service or business. So, having a ghost writer can be useful, but you want to make sure that the writer understands your business and is writing content that you approve of and is accurate.
From here, you need to promote not only your website but the great content you do create. This can be done in the form of social media, blogging on someone else’s website for related content and offering a link back to your website or on content promotion websites such as Scoop-it, Flipboard, or Co-promote.
It’s also important to gather back links from various sources. A high-quality back link can be worth 300 mediocre or low-quality back links. You also want to make sure never to buy back links. There is no quick way to get excellent ratings. If anyone promises you the moon when it comes to search engine optimization or it seems too good to be true, it always is. You will spend more time fixing bad SEO mistakes than you will ever spend creating good moves.
WHAT WE DO
For years, we’ve had three different levels of search engine optimization marketing options. Our Level 1 has just been one blog post or article for your website a month. Now, we do research the information in a blog post to make sure that it is accurate and localized for the area if applicable. But then we also promote that information on a variety of social media sites and content promotion sites. This gets the site out there and keeps the site active. While this may not drive an enormous number of leads to your website every month, it keeps your website active, keeps fresh content revolving on the website, and keeps the website in front of Google and other search engines. If the website is already doing well, this is a good way to maintain rankings and continually keep the information in front of your customer’s eyes.
Our Level 2 is one blog or article a week. This keeps the site even more active. Google visits websites every so often to see if there is any change or activity on the website. If you find that there is activity every week, the search engine may return to the website more often. If there’s additional changes, Google search robots will come back again even more frequently. The more often Google searches your site and finds something new, the more important it will rank it. Also, your site will get in front of customers more often on the social media outlets and on promotion sites.
Our Level 3 is two blogs or articles a week. But, this also goes beyond in that we do more research for the website. We make sure that we’re not just working on the website and promoting the website but working off-site in other content creation scenarios and linking back from guest blog posts, high-quality article writing sites and gaining back links from.edu or.gov sites.
We have always said, we sometimes work ourselves out of a job. We love to teach, coach, consultant and train people to do their own search engine optimization and marketing. Many people have a desire to learn it and do it themselves. Not only will it save them marketing dollars, but they can learn a new skill to help any website in any business that they are in.
While we do hold onto a few secrets for our customers. We really want to be transparent to anyone reading our information. We want to be able to showcase the most important aspects of marketing, how to do it yourself, and how to stay active.
Our most recent launch was with an SEO Coaching option. For a limited time, we’re offering our coaching and consulting membership at just $35 a month. This will give you access to automated marketing reports, give you the tools and secrets to fix any marketing or optimization problems your site might currently be having, review all your marketing data in one place, manage your links, research your competitors, and have one-on-one personalized phone consultations each month. No other coaching service that we have found does all of these things for this price. We will also offer customized videos to tell you how to redirect any old links, help you find your niche in the online world, create dynamic posts and pages for your website, create awesome call to action buttons and taglines and effectively build back links to your site. We even tell you how to manage and market your website on social media.
Yes, it’s a lot. But, you can do this. Just a few hours a month is really all it takes to understand and implement some of the major SEO tactics that can set your website apart and get more leads to your business. It’s not about just being found; it’s about getting leads that puts more dollars into your pocket. If you’re interested in learning about our new coaching program and what all that entails us a call anytime. You are welcome to check out our coaching page for more details. This coaching program is in BETA form at the moment. Prices will be going up once we get our initial limit.
As much as I hate cheesy advertising and marketing, there’s really no other way to tell you all that we do and how you can do it for yourself and your business.
Call Us to Learn More at 425-443-8372
Post originally published: Why a Little SEO Work Just Doesn’t Cut it