So, what’s this so called “SEO”?

Search Engine Optimization, known better as “SEO” is the organic / unpaid side of increasing the amount of key words and phrases that are related to your products/services that your website shows up for when searched by people online.

Why is SEO important for businesses?

The ability to predict determines our capacity for success.

What SEO does is give us a knowledge base of about how many people are searching for words or phrases on a regular basis. This then gives you the capability to go search for other related words and test those words and phrases against one another to find out what it is that works for you exactly.

Googles algorithm takes into account something called LSI. It’s short for latent semantic indexing.

This is basically where Google’s algorithms are taking into account the context of every word that surrounds another within blog posts, comments, autogenerated subtitles on YouTube and whatever other ways they have to be able to associate patterns in language, behavior and other personal information.

Gary Vaynerchuck started sensoring his own youtube videos even though he’s an advocate of cursing according to what we know about him and how he talks consistently.

The reason I bring up LSI in particular is because that’s what gives Google the ability to understand what it is that we are doing and saying to each other online.

Google and other companies that thrive off using user data wants to capture and contextualize every interaction that they can so that they can better predict the future.

I can go and search google trends right now to find out what gets searched more out of 5 different terms which I’ll show you an example of below.

Same thing goes for algorithms. They are constantly on the search for new patterns and then taking the time to predict what will happen in the next sequence of events using all the different data that it has access to.

This is why SEO or Search Engine Optimization is so important.

SEO lets us label our website as a highly relevent source of information for whatever it is that we want to rank for as long as we take the necessary steps to get our website optimized according to Google’s standards.

The biggest factors that Google uses to make decisions about who shows up higher than another company or website are listed below. Obviously we can’t know EXACTLY how much each of these areimpacting or not impacting our site but we can know one thing, when traffic starts hitting from SEO, you know when theyre leads from SEO because the quality in the leads almost triple in the scenarios I’ve been closely involved with.

I can’t tell for sure but it seems like the impact of showing up higher on Google inherently increases trust and loyalty of people that find our clients organically in comparison to right off the bat because Google chose you to rank and that’s something in line with other highly trusted companies that exist today.

Once you optimize your website, it creates an opportunity for Google to start sending traffic to your site for whatever words and phrases you are trying to rank for to see what visitors do when they do get to your website.

Google choosing to put your website on top of its search results is a pretty big deal depending on what search phrases you’re getting ranked number one for.

According to Hubspot, a digital marketing software company, 34% of “near me” searches done via desktop and tablets result in store visits.

This results in a spike of quality leads and demand for your services.

So if that’s something that you think may be of help to you, Let’s get into it and the basics of getting started with SEO

How Does SEO Work?

To make it as easy for you to understand, SEO is the process of modifying the variables Google uses to measure website credibility to your advantage so that the right sites get shown at the right time for the right search query to the right person according to the current context.

Understanding and using [all of the 200+ variables] in accordance with one another to help your site become more readable to Google’s site makes Google ecstatic and want to show your website to more users more often.

That’s essentially how SEO works for the most part. It’s making Google happy by making your site readable and better able to be understood by its algorithm and its users when they come to your site.

Doing SEO shows Google that you are serious about letting it know what your site is about but also shows Google that you are serious about providing a great experience to and for the people that are searching for products or services related to yours.

If Google decides to show your website at the top of a search query it’ll likely have a massive compounding effect over time (especially for local businesses). Local SEO is what you want to focus on if you’re a local business. But you still want to keep in mind the bigger picture if you plan to expand in the future larger than you are now.

This process may take time but it’s definitely worth every second spent on improving your site to meet the standards of Google to get free traffic driven to your website.

The blunt and short answer to that is, unless you would rather spend a dollar for a lead then 10 cents, you want SEO services working their magic even while you sleep AND while you aren’t paying for the attention since its being handed to you by Google based on the needs of their client.

Anyone that has a website and sells anything absolutely needs SEO services. In my opinion, I think that investing in content and distribution is one of the most undervalued investments you could make in the long term but no one looks at marketing as an investment that’s long term a majority of the time.

What I see assume they’ll lose money on acquiring and then make up for it and reach profitability years down the line sometimes because of how much it is to acquire and increase CLV otherwise known as CVO (Customer value optimization) which I like to think of as a direct opposition to attrition.

Unless your product or information about it is literally never searched for or the competitiveness is just ridiculous on PPC and you don’t want to deal with it ever just for that reason, then sure skimp out on it. But if either of those two scenarios is one that isnt shared with you, I highly recommend you consider investing in SEO.

This is the foundation of optimizing any online sales process. In other words, you shouldn’t be running ads or doing anything else (in my opinion) without first optimizing your website and making it easy to read by Google and it’s visitors coming from Google or any other source.

Why do I say this? Because if you are getting website visitors to your site and you have your analytics and other stuff installed thats necessary to track revenue and attribution Google is watching this happen but there isn’t any SEO on your website to tell Google what the site is about, your site won’t rank or gain momentum without TONS of paid ads. And even then, I bet the quality of the traffic that comes from doing SEO is approximately 40 percent more likely to convert if the terms are bottom of funnel terms.

I’m sure by now you’re wondering if this facet of digital marketing can really help you or your business succeed in this age of technology and mass information.

How SEO can help your business thrive

For most of our clients, the factor that is consistently discussed and cared about most when starting to use SEO is almost always used to increase either the quality or quantity lead generation that’s already being done or to completely start fresh with a new approach.

This is because SEO is the number one way to be found locally and globally by any kind of audience.

We’ve also seen that this is [by far the highest return on investment long term] when compared to any other strategy used in digital marketing.

Google is used to search over 3.5 billion times daily according to Wordstream.

The reason that SEO causes such a dramatic increase in results and the number of leads generated is because of these constant searches being done by anyone that has access to the internet looking for anything online.

Now, if you did the work necessary before that potential customer searched, theres a chance that Google may steer traffic your direction rather than a competitors because maybe cookies line up better with what you ar selling and what

We have a client of ours that’s a photographer and he was struggling to get a consistent flow of leads. He has great skills and is even known for taking some of the best celebrity photos out there. But there wasn’t any predictable lead flow for him.

He would get a lot of requests at one time and then have nothing for two weeks and sometimes up to two months.

We started work for him and within a month, he had locals calling him for corporate headshots and other events and it was consistent. SEO can bring in leads quickly but don’t expect it. It’s best to take SEO with the approach of it’ll take 3-6 months for you to start gaining traction with your SEO efforts.

So how does this happen?

What can you do to improve your SEO for your website?

Here’s a small list of the big things you can do to start improving your SEO starting today.

keep in mind though that link building

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the cornerstone to any successful SEO strategy and improvement. It’s the process of going through and finding the actual search terms people are typing into search engines. This is the beginning of your content and content marketing strategy

Define Objectives

With your business, you should have certain objectives you want to hit to reach certain goals online each month, quarter, and year. This is the same with your SEO and digital marketing strategy except we have to measure them in a bit more of a granular way and through online measurements such as how many visitors came to your website, how many of those visitors watched a video of yours on your website, how many completed a lead form and other objectives along those lines. These are all examples of what we would call “conversions”.

Competitve Analysis

Competitive analysis is a strong anchor point for SEO strategy.

it is essentially finding the terms you want to rank for, typing those terms into a search engine and then analyzing the top websites and looking at their company sales process online to see what model they are using.

Are they trying to get you to download a guide online? are they trying to get you on the phone with a sales rep immediately? What are they doing to turn you (a website visitor) into a paying customer? That’s really what you are looking for when doing competitor analysis along with other technical factors but we won’t get into that toomuch right now.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is going through your website and looking at your goals, and making sure that what you have on your website and how you display elements on your website such as logos, photos, and text is aligned with what your company goals and objectives are.

Page Level Analysis

Page level analysis is satisfying the intent of whomever is searching for and visiting the page in all aspects along with ensuring that Google knows what the page is about.

Content Analysis

Content analysis is making sure that the content that is on your website is engaging, informative, and correct. This includes making sure your information is up to date, grammar and spelling is properly used, and the overall structure satisfies Googles algorithm and the user that is using your site as a source of information. Side note: Content marketing (using content to help your website get found more online through helpful content) is one of the fastest ways to grow your business and scale. The more good content you can produce for people searching for information surrounding products and services like yours (without trying to sell) is very productive and helpful to your business but most companies don’t know how to do this yet. So, starting now will give you a leg up.

User Experience Analysis

User experience analysis is looking at the overall experience users are having when visiting your website. Using [Google analytics] to find out things like how long people are staying on your website for and what they are clicking on when visiting pages can give you key insights as to what changes need to be made to help your visitors find what they are looking for faster. This increases the speed that you’re able to build a relationship with your website visitors. This benefits you and your company in a variety of ways.

Link Analysis

Link analysis requires a bit more of a technical explanation. To put it simply, this is the process of going through your website and checking to make sure that every link click on your website leads to the proper page. This could be a link to another one of your web pages or another websites page if you are linking to a different website as a source of information to help confirm something mentioned on your website.

Citation Analysis

Citation analysis is the process of ensuring that everywhere people go on the internet, there isn’t any information that conflicts with each other about how to reach you or your company.

So that is in essence really just making sure that:

• Your company address
• Your company phone number, website and other sources of information is all aligned and directing people down the correct pathway to find you or connect with you and you’re all set!

Here is a recap of what you can expect SEO to do for your business.

Overall, the SEO process is of huge benefit to any business looking to increase consistent quality leads and demand for its products or services. This is what you can expect to get from SEO along with many other intangible benefits.

1. Increased lead quality
2. Increased lead quantity
3. Increase in lead consistency
4. Increase in brand trust and customer loyalty
5. Brand equity

I hope you’ll take the time to improve your SEO so you are better able to serve your clients and take pride in showing up in the top search results for your services.

If you’d like any help, you can always schedule a strategy call, we’d love to hear from you below or on a phone call to better help you understand how this all works together to benefit your business.