This week I participated of the SEOmoz seminar which took place in lovely Seattle.
It was enlightening to watch all these cool industry experts sharing their knowledge about SEO to over 200 attentive souls. The amount of information was overwhelming and the whole experience was surely a humbling one – we can never know as much as we think we do.
In the middle of so much information, there were certainly 3 points which I found key to those starting in SEO:
1. Look to increase traffic NOT your position on Google/ Bing / Yahoo.
This one sounds like a mad one but trust me when I say that not all traffic is generated from search engine results. Count niche directories and referrals from other sites in the industry.
More importantly, a lot of folks do keep their metrics to SERPS related to keywords brought into account without very little (or no) research. Remember those long tail keywords and that customers are more likely to find you using a number of queries such as ‘swindon based seo company” rather than “Swindon seo”. Targeting long tail searches can vastly increase your chances of converting traffic into sales.
2. Clients don’t care about SEO, they care about how much money comes in as a result of your work.
When looking to offer a site a SEO audit… When looking to offer a business a SEO audit, think what will be best for that business and how you can help that business to increase its customer base and sales margins by having a strong internet presence.
Research into this industry’s competitors, find out what clients are looking for and then draw your plan to drive these customers to your client’s site. Forget about pitching a whole lot of technical crap to clients looking to hire your SEO services: have business information to hand to show them what will help creating sales.
3. The world of ‘Free” search is over
Please don’t think I am sending everyone to ditch their SEO efforts and use pay per click solutions. With an increasing amount of people turning to the internet to search for products & services, the first positions for your desired query will be very likely to be competitive ones.
If your competitors have higher rankings than you do, you will be surely losing the opportunity to make money when they are gaining.
In order to be part of the first 5 or 10 positions, there is a lot of effort and time involved. No one is at the top of competition without effort. Whether this effort is in house or by a third party, there is always a level of investment involved and you shouldn’t forget that if you are not dedicating 20% of your budget to your SEO efforts you will surely be falling behind of your competition.
You may ask: Pay per click is a lot cheaper right? Pay per click may look cheaper because you are paying small amounts of money over a period of time which makes it look cheap.
But over the long run, investing in SEO tactics that will increase your organic positioning will be far cheaper & more effective. It’s proven that users will have a higher level of trust & more inclined to commit to a purchase from sites that have been found on the organic searches as opposed to the sponsored ads.
Looking to improve your website traffic & increase your sales? Acrylic Web can offer you a tailored SEO solution that can help you to achieve just that… and more
