Three Things I Learned About my Business from SEO
Probably one of the first things you’ll hear a business owner tell you about their SEO experience is that “it doesn’t happen overnight”. Truer words were never spoken by an impatient business owner who is scared of the cash investment he/she just made. If you stayed long enough to hear what this wise person had to say, you’d probably hear “you better get someone good” next. We couldn’t agree more. Being on the business end with our clients after a crash and burn experience from a black hat SEM agency out to make killer profits at the expense of hard-earned customer cash leaves a jaded feeling that’s hard to shake. The bright side to all of this is that through hard times comes the payoff: lessons learned. We’ve got three of them for you:
Life Lesson 1: Network Your Website
We don’t mean that you should make up business cards and attend meetings with like-minded folks around your community. The life lesson here is about link building strategies. Around the late 90’s new websites were going live on the Internet at alarming rates. Because SEO had already been born, it became apparent to search engines that they were going to have to figure out a way to establish authority and website presence. Through this, link algorithms were born as a way to filter out the quality sites and reward them with high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings. And getting links is not unlike attending a business networking event. The key to making it work is to incorporate links into your search marketing strategy, rather than to leave them as an afterthought or use rogue “link buying” methods. Links say a lot about you and give your business reach, and an authoritative voice, in the online marketplace. The message is the same today: your website is only as strong as its weakest link.
Life Lesson 2: Analyze From the Top Down
A good SEO strategist uses a number of analytical tools and from that they can gain a limitless amount of data from working your site with search engine algorithms. Sometimes the best rank for your business isn’t Number 1. Sometimes businesses find out that their top five keywords are all wrong for SEO. Sometimes we learn that fancy Flash website Intro turned out to be an expensive lesson in website design for search engines. Through it all, with analytical data we learn more than a lot about our business. SEO can paint our core customer’s portrait and tell us demographic data, as well as user search behavior. SEO data can be applied as a baseline to predict future trends, so businesses know what to expect and can accommodate their customers accordingly. In truth, the data that exists from an SEO strategy is so numerous we could write months of SEO newsletter articles (you may see some next month!), but more importantly business owners tell us that the stats they have gained from search engine optimization has taught them more about their business than the first three years they started.
Life Lesson 3: Put Your Best Online Face Forward
You didn’t think we were going to skip out on talking about your website here, did you? If you’ve got a website that’s nothing more than some long forgotten project, and who even knows where the logins for the admin side are anyways – we’ve got a wake-up call for you. With literally billions of websites in existence, and more popping up every day, your website is your business’ first customer impression. Blow it, and they’ll send their sales over to your competitor. If you don’t even have a website, you’re missing out on huge customer potential. When we talk to local business owners who struggled to gain a foothold in the marketplace, the single most advantageous advertising effort they deployed was their website. Today those local businesses are still refining their websites, adding fresh content and even some videos of their product in use. They’re also using what they learned from Life Lesson 2, and applying it to their online presence. Your company’s website is your 24/7 voice in your industry; when customers are searching be ready for them.