Search engine optimization can be a topic that sounds technical and complicated – all those acronyms and complex terms and opposing opinions. But really, there are two big truths you need to know about search engine optimization. The concepts are simple, and it’s absolutely essential to get it right to grow your business.
Let’s start with the concepts first. Search engine optimization is pretty much what it sounds like – optimizing the content you create on your website to be found by search engines. This isn’t an ad strategy – anyone can pay to get their ad at the top of the search results immediately. SEO is about creating content that gets found in organic search results, without you paying to be found. To do this, you need to align your content with the things people want to find – with what they’re searching for on Google or Bing.
This might sound like you’re writing the content for the search engines themselves. But that’s a big misconception. In the first few years of SEO, that’s exactly what happened – marketers wrote content stuffed with keywords whether or not the articles and web pages made sense to a human reading them. But search engines like Google are smart, and they adjusted to make sure searches were surfacing content that was helpful and engaging to their audience. After all, that’s what makes search engines popular with users.
SEO for Your Content
Creating content that search engines will find and trust today is a matter of a few elements. First, you need well-written content that answers questions the search audience is asking, or gives them information they find interesting. If you’re a cheese company, that could mean writing articles about the process of producing cheese, or a long FAQ blog post about the commonly asked questions on cheese-making.
Do Keyword Research
But writing great content on its own isn’t enough to get your content found by the people who are using search engines. You also need to use targeted keywords that will point the search engines to your content, and you need to find which keywords have a high volume of people searching for them but not much competition for those viewers. Finding trending search queries can give you an idea of what topics are gaining popularity right now so you can create relevant content.
That’s where keyword research becomes important. You can use online tools like SEMrush to find keywords with high search volume but low competition and write articles on those topics, adding in the keywords where they fit naturally. You don’t want to force anything, because your readers will notice if your writing sounds artificial.
Write Engaging Content
You also want the content to be engaging so readers spend more time on the page. Search engines are calculating how quickly your readers leave (also known as your bounce rate) because content that answers their questions will hold their attention for a while. If they’re leaving quickly, something is missing.
Search engines also prioritize recent content over older pages or posts. That means you need to be creating content on a regular and consistent basis – have a plan for publishing blog posts weekly (or at the minimum monthly). This is really important for SEO, but also for keeping your existing audience engaged. No one wants to read a four-year-old article on the best events in your city – it’s not relevant anymore.
Don’t be afraid to get specific in your keywords and your content. If your audience is searching for a granular topic (“best cheese-making tools for goat’s milk”) they have specific needs you can now fill. If you’re in a very niche business, this strategy can really work well for you. You can quickly become a trusted expert for your small but passionate target audience. And you can bring them in through your organic content.
Use Lots of Keywords
And don’t be shy about using more than one keyword in an article. One strategy that can pay dividends if you’re writing in an area that’s crowded with plenty of similar content, like digital marketing, is to choose one short keyword that has very high search volume but lots of competition. Then, choose several longer keywords with decent search volume and low competition and incorporate those in the article or blog post as well. Combining short and long keywords can allow search engines to comb what your blog post covers more quickly and thoroughly. It allows people who are searching for exactly what you’re writing about to find you easily.
What’s the most important thing to remember when writing SEO content? You’re writing for your audience of humans – not for the search engines. Of course, you’re making sure your content is easy for search engines to find, understand, and show to their users. But people are the ones who are reading the end product, not machines. Writing SEO content that performs well on Google and engages your very real audience is an art it can take a while to master. But it’s critical to get it right to see the best results.
SEO for Your Website
That covers search engine optimization for your content. But SEO isn’t just about making your articles and blog posts SEO-friendly. Your site as a whole is also critical to your search engine rankings. Search engines look for indications that your site is a reliable source of information.
This is often measured by how many other websites link to yours, called backlinks. If your content is helpful and valuable, it’s natural for other websites to link to it in related articles as a trusted source. This process can take a while, so often marketers will engage in link building tactics which can speed up the process. Some of those are above-board but engaging in less honest methods can get you punished by search engines.
Link-building tactics that work well can be as simple as sharing your links with other local businesses in exchange for a link on their sites. Make sure you’re sharing your content on social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn to give others the opportunity to share it or link to it. Or consider writing guest blogs for businesses in similar industries in exchange for a link back to your site.
This might seem like a lot of work, but link-building is critical to getting search engines to recognize and respect your site. After all, other sites wouldn’t be sharing your work unless it was high-quality and informative.
Organizing Your Site Flow
SEO strategy for your site as a whole also involves organizing your content on your website into topics, which help search engines understand what a user’s intent is when they’re searching. A best practice is organizing your site around topics and then finding keywords related to those topics, so search engines see your site as an expert guide.
In the cheese company example above, they would be best served by focusing on cheese as a whole and then searching for cheese-related keywords to plan articles and pages around. For most businesses, your best bet is going to be writing about what you know and do every day. Write in an in-depth and accessible way that speaks to your target audience while naturally incorporating those keywords you’ve researched.
An underrated but important factor in site ranking is how fast your pages load. Search engines want to prioritize content that’s user-friendly. And if your blog posts have huge image files, they will take forever to load. That’s a frustrating experience for your readers.
How can you increase your site load speeds? The biggest culprit in site slowdowns is media or images that are too large. Very large images are usually more difficult for a browser to load. When you’re uploading any pictures or graphics to a specific blog post or your site as a whole, make sure to use a tool like TinyPNG or Squoosh to compress them. Small means fast, and fast means getting found.
Speed, topic clarity and authority, and backlinks are all rank factors for search engines. When your site ranks highly, so do your individual pieces of content – it’s all working together. Don’t neglect it.
Measuring Your Results
By now, you’ve got your site all set up with the best SEO practices, and your content is all optimized too. Your keywords are in order and your content is engaging your readers. You’ve spent a lot of time putting all the pieces in place.
With all that time invested, don’t let your work go to waste. You need a system for measuring your SEO results to keep track of what’s working well and tweaking what’s performing poorly. This is where webmaster tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console come into play.
These tools give you insight into how many people are seeing your content in searches, clicking through to it, and what they’re doing once they’re on your site. Are they making purchases? Are they getting lost in a particular topic and clicking away? Who is seeing your content – by age, location, and more? These webmaster tools have incredibly valuable data that you need to track your SEO efforts. Get them set up as soon as possible so you don’t miss out on this information.
Stay Up to Date
One last tip – things change quickly in the SEO world. Google and its kin are updating their algorithms constantly and best practices change alongside. Check in on blogs like Hubspot and Moz frequently for updates. This is especially important if you’ve noticed any big shifts in traffic lately – big drops or big jumps that aren’t tied directly to new posts.
And don’t just read about updates. Make them on your content and your pages too. Information goes out of date, priorities shift, and you want to be sure each piece of content is performing at its highest level. Mark your calendar once a month or a quarter to go in and tweak what’s old or just not working anymore. Your SEO rankings will thank you.
Why You Need SEO:
Get More Sustained Leads (free) and Pay Less for Ads
All this SEO work can seem like a lot of… well, work. And it does require an investment of time, both up-front and on a regular basis, to create and maintain a successful SEO strategy. But why is it worth investing all that time and effort into something that takes months to a year to pay off?
It’s because SEO is about building the future of your business through sustained leads.
Search engine optimization is vital for your long-term growth strategy. You will invest time now and get results later – but those results are sustainable and will last for years.
Paid ads on search engine results, social media platforms, and website banner ads will get you high-intent customers fast. But your strategy needs to be dialed in perfectly to get results without blowing your marketing budget.
What are Sustained Leads?
Sustained leads mean you are visible. People find you first. When someone searches for your services, you are there. All of this takes time.
Think for a minute about how much you need to spend on ads today to keep people coming to your website and purchasing your services or products. Ads are highly effectively, whether you’re using social media ads, search ads, banner ads, or a combination. But that effectiveness comes at a cost – and that cost really ads up over the months or years.
If you could get that traffic flow into your site, and make those same conversions, without paying for ads? That would be a gamechanger. Each customer would be more profitable, and you could redirect your marketing budget into other areas to increase your sales and profits even further.
That’s exactly what sustained leads do for you.
By optimizing your website and your content to be found and understood by search engines, you’re enabling a steady and increasing flow of traffic into your website for free. By targeting keywords with a high search volume and continuously making your site into a trusted authority, you’ll have more and more search traffic coming in every month. And while you will be investing your time or your money initially in creating that content, once it’s online, it will bring in traffic for months and years to come without spending another dollar.
That’s how you build a strong foundation for your business.
Sustained Leads in Digital Marketing
Using SEO to get sustained leads doesn’t mean you give up on paid ads entirely once your traffic starts to increase. A successful digital marketing strategy incorporates both quick leads, like those you get from paid ads, and sustained leads from SEO. This mix ensures you always have a pipeline of leads coming into your business.
In the beginning of your business marketing plan, as you get your website set up and your digital presence and SEO established, you will need to rely more heavily on paid ads. They provide a way to get customers in the door quickly, without waiting for the results of SEO. That’s critical because you have bills to pay, and a business to build.
But over time, if your marketing strategy still relies heavily on paid ads, each new customer you acquire becomes less profitable because you’re spending a fair amount of money to attract them. That’s damaging for the long-term prospects of your business.
On the other hand, sustained leads have a very low cost – you will initially need to invest either time, to write your content yourself, or money, to engage someone to create it for you. But once that initial investment is made, then you’re on the road to sustainable success.
How to Combine Paid Ads and Organic Content
Starting with paid ads means you’ll get a good idea of what your ideal customers are searching for and clicking on. Take note of what keywords are working for your ads best – then keep running those paid search campaigns while you embark on your SEO campaign. Focus on those keywords that you know from your paid ads are working for you as you create your organic content. Then as your SEO starts to pay off, you can ease off on the paid ads as the sustained leads roll in.
Sustained leads are especially important for companies in industries where the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is low, or where advertising costs are high. If your industry is saturated and you’re paying top dollar to compete for digital ad space with larger, more established companies, a paid ad strategy will significantly decrease your profits over time.
On the other hand, if you’re investing in SEO from the beginning, your paid ad leads will be replaced by sustained leads who provide lots of lifetime value at a low cost.
Gaining and Keeping Sustained Leads
Modern SEO isn’t about the number of keywords on your site, having the most backlinks, or being ranked #1 for a single phrase. It’s about great websites that people love, with content that Google values and that entices visitors to read and to take action.
That means to create a truly effective sustained lead pipeline, you can’t just focus on creating lots of content. Since search engines like Google are looking at not just how many people visit your site, but how long they stay on it and how many links they click, you want to create content that engages and satisfies your visitors.
How do you create content that gets you high-quality sustained leads? By being thoughtful about what your ideal customer truly wants. Creating filler content isn’t going to give your visitors the answer to the questions they have, or help them in their lives. You will attract more high-quality leads by developing very high-quality, informative, valuable content on a regular basis. If you’re skimping on this, you won’t reap most of the benefits of sustained leads.
Creating High-Value Content
How can you create this kind of high-value content that delights your readers and gets them to become customers? With a few key steps:
- Commit to a content creation schedule, so your blog posts, videos, and article stay up to date and accurate.
- Conduct keyword research so you know what your customers are searching for, and what keywords you can reasonably rank for.
- Understand what your ideal customers actually want to read. If they’re looking for that cheese-buying content mentioned above, and you’re telling them how to make their own cheese, you’re disconnected from their needs.
- Create well-written, error-free, engaging content. (This is trickier than it seems – hiring a professional writer can help.)
- Create value for your visitors. Are your articles and videos just regurgitating obvious information to fit in keywords? Or are you providing them with information that truly helps them in their lives in some way?
WE’VE PERFECTED THE ART OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
For more than 6 years, companies across the nation have entrusted search engine optimization to ContentFirst.Marketing. Through constant research, trial and error, and training, we’ve perfected a strategy that delivers results. That’s why we have one of the highest client retention rates in the industry.
On-Page SEO
Using Industry-leading tools and proprietary systems, we quickly identify your site’s optimization issues with a technical SEO audit. These include: duplicate content, title tags and meta tags; “thin” or low content levels on site pages; broken links; page speed issues, SSL/HTTPS implementation, missing title and meta tags, missing or poorly written headers, image alt tags, nofollow attributes, crawlability, content rendering, AMP configuration, and more.
Local Search Engine Optimization
We’ll target your customers and prospects with local specific keywords, increasing your visibility and driving traffic. We focus on both organic search results and map pack listings.
Tracking, Analytics, and Reporting
We often hear nightmare stories from clients about SEO companies “not doing anything.” We actually want you to know what’s going on with your project so that you can help provide information and be confident about our work!
Call Tracking
With call tracking and A/B testing, we’ll know where visitors came from, what search terms they used, and what’s converting visitors to customers. This is an essential tool for conversion optimization.
Monthly Report
Each month, your project manager will produce a report and discuss it with you. The report details analytics, completed work, and upcoming plans. The PM may also make suggestions on strategy and program adjustments as needed.
Website Traffic Reports
We can provide an on-demand, customized dashboard depending on your needs. Your monthly project manager conversation will ensure that we’re on the same page.
Schedule Your FREE Competitive Analysis
We feel business owners are tired of spending their time and money on marketing efforts that don’t deliver real growth. We bring proven digital marketing strategies tailored to your business, so you get real and measurable results, leads, and sales. Get a free site and strategy review today, and discover what measurable results can mean for your business.
