5 Things You Should Know About SEO

Did you know that over 95% of websites are making costly SEO mistakes which equals much lost revenue.

If you want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), but didn’t know where to start, here you go!

SEO can bring you new customers organically. But learning SEO is is very time consuming.  Especially if you’re busy running your business.  When learning, you have to sort through all the myths and misinformation to find the real facts about SEO.

That’s why we’re happy to discuss your needs, answer your questions, and help you make the right decision about SEO — even if we never do business together.

How SEO Can Help Grow Your Business

1)  SEO is not a cost. It’s an investment in your business, just like you invest in tools and machinery, SEO becomes an asset.

If your customer is only going to buy your product or service one time, then you should look at the lifetime value of your customers. How much do they spend with you each year? What is the long term value of a new customer? How much money can you expect to gain from each person/sale for the duration of doing business together? This needs to be amortized into your cost of acquisition.  Divide cost of acquisition by life time value and you get your ROI.

You’re creating an asset that will yield profits for the next 10 or 20 years – or lifespan of your relationship with each customer.

Taking this long-term view, you realize that anything you can do to bring in new customers – like SEO – is not a short-term expense, but an investment.

This thought process helps you gain market share and you know that when you gain market share, your competitors loose market share.

2)  SEO Lets you take advantage of Google’s algorythms

Today, almost everybody starts any buying decision at Google. And if they find your website near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s an implied endorsement of your business by Google. Because people believe that if your business is at the top of Google, it has credibility built in.

When your business shows up where your customers are, when they’re making a purchasing decision, you have a great advantage. They visit your website already with a trust factor built in.  This makes the selling process much easier.

3)  SEO can be outsourced to free up time for you

We do the SEO work for you. And that frees you up to do what you do best, run your business.  We keep up-to-date on the latest changes to Google’s algorithms, and can help you take advantage of those changes by implementing them into your site.

If you think about it, you outsource a lot of  things in your life and business and other tasks that are not you’re not so proficient at.  So why would you want to try to learn and keep up with the continual changing SEO rules which you can outsource to people who do it day in day out?

By outsourcing your SEO, you get it done better and faster and more cost-effectively than if you tried to learn it and do it yourself. This frees you up to grow your business and do what you are best at.

4)  SEO outperforms paid traffic

If your SEO is done properly it will drastically reduce the amount of advertising you will need to spend to get eyeballs o your business.  You don’t need to run near as many (if any) ads on Google Ads or Bing ads.  With proper SEO, you will get more organic, unpaid search results that drive up to 75% of all traffic from search engines.

What percentage of your marketing budget do you dedicate to paid vs. unpaid search? If you’re like most businesses, you’re spending up to 80% of your online marketing dollars on paid traffic. That means you’re throwing away huge amounts of money for traffic – and new customers that could be had by utilizing a tool available to you.

5)  SEO leverages Buyer Psychology

Marketing is like trying to hit a moving target. You’re betting that sticking a sales pitch in front of enough prospects will entice enough of them to buy.  We call that the mud on the wall technique.  Throw enough mud on a wall and some of it has to stick.  The problem with that is that most of the mud  hits the ground.  If in this scenario, mud is money spent on advertising, then you are wasting lots of it.

That’s what makes proper SEO so important and valuable.

When your website shows up in the unpaid search results, it changes the dynamics of the transaction.  Instead of you initiating the conversation to sell, your prospect comes to you and that leverages your position. If the title and description of your web page appears to have a solution to their problem, people are more likely to click on your link. This is organic traffic.  And it differs greatly paid advertising, which has the little (AD) symbol on the left of those links.  Mostly, these are paid ads by the national companies that claim to be local to you!  You have to do a little research to see if they are in fact local or just doing a national ad campaign.  This is really annoying for a lot of searches but it does show the potential of the Google Ads!  Just make sure if you are going to be using them, to narrow your target down to target only the type of customers you want and in the demographics that work for your business.

Because SEO can generate such a high conversion rate it justifies the expense to implement by it’s high return on investment.

The Truth About SEO

Some people try to do SEO in-house and gEt penalized by Google for breaking the rules. But beware, just because you see someone with a YouTube video, doesn’t make them an expert either.  Most of them are young, energetic people with a knack for gab.  I have heard their track records spout a whopping 7 month average client engagement!  We have been doing business with some of our clients over 20 years.  Which would you rather work with, a guy who has a great speal on YouTube who looses clients after 7 months or someone who brings results to their customers for over 20 years?

This means we have to get results in an increasingly competitive environment.

Why not take advantage of our 33 years of experience and get someone working for you to make your websites SEO beneficial?

It’s Easy And Free

It starts with a conversation with you. We listen to what you have to say about your needs and your goals. We find out where your pain is and develop a plan to eliminate it!  Are you wanting more local customers? Are your competitors ranking higher than you in Google?  Do you need more foot traffic?  More online business?  Whatever you need, that is where we focus.

Second, analyze your website and it’s domain authority using analytics, showing you how many website visitors you’re getting, where they come from, and other important metrics.

Did you know that Google makes over 200 changes per year just in how they rank web pages?  We continually track their changes and make adjustments on web pages to take into account those changes so your pages can continue to move up the rank ladder.

What is The Next Step

First, you need to realize that just as your products and services are not free, we also need to charge for our services or neither of us would still be in business.  So you need to recognize the potential benefits and evaluate if the extra cost of doing business is within your budget or if you need to increase your budget in order to increase your business.  Remember that investing in your web presence is no longer a luxury for the few, but a very important part of your business that you shouldn’t ignore.

We’ll evaluate your business and website and recommend products and services which include SEO. Then we will discuss what to implement now and what to do at a later time.

Is Google penalizing you for not being mobile friendly?

Did you know that among the things that Google now takes into consideration concerning your website is load speed and mobile friendliness?  You can do 85% of the things right (and there are over 200 pages of what to do’s) and still not get the rankings you are wanting if your site doesn’t load right on a cell phone!  The ability for a website to work on desktops, tablets and phones is called responsive.  Having a responsive website was irrelevant only a few short years ago, but now, it MUST be responsive.  Most older website (over 5 or 6 years old) are probably not responsive.  That is because the tools weren’t available to build them.  Today, most of the Themes, pagebuilders, plugins and other tools are being built with responsiveness in mind.  This is a HUGE part of your SEO working for you instead of against you.

If your site is not responsive, you need to first re-invest in a new website.  We can help you do that or you can head over to our resource page and get the tools you need to do it yourself.  If you have the time, energy and inclination to build your own website, then the resource page is chock full of our recommended products you will need to make it happen.  Start with a good hosting plan, add a theme, page builder and a few choice plugins and you will have a great start on doing it yourself.  If you aren’t so inclined to do the work, then you can just have us build for you.  We have over 25 years of website building and over 45 years of graphic design.

Pick up the phone and give us a call.