I imagine every business owner wants the secret to cutting down the cost of getting leads and sales for their business. So I thought diving deeper in into the topic I think is the number one way to get half priced leads would be a good starting point.
Most businesses are caught in two states. These states are the way they approach their marketing for the business.
The first state is not really doing much with their marketing and really undervaluing themselves by not promoting their skills online.
The second state are those promoting themselves online who understand the value of marketing. These business owners will be using some form of pay per click advertising with Google, Facebook, TikTok or LinkedIn and the other channels.
Well what if both states could get better results than they have in a a month or two by doing one marketing type only. Thats the secret sauce right there for everyone. My go to for any business that wants to increase leads and sales at a reduced rate to any paid advertising channel is of course SEO.
The marketing channel that comes with the most stigma attached to it. This is because no one can control the goal posts that make up best standards. Google clouds the actual inner workings of this so much that no one person even at Google can know how the search engine evaluates things.
Freelance SEO services local and ecommerce.
The Positives: When you have targeted keywords all setup you start seeing growth in your online visibility. This helps with traffic to your website and in turn leads and sales. SEO does help reduce the amount you spend on your paid advertising.
The Negatives: It takes some time to kick in and for results to show. Typically results should start to show in 30-40 days.
As a business owner you probly have a thousand questions about SEO and how it impacts your business, how it works, what it is and how to see it. Thats the usual business owner frustration, they can not see the work being done.
It all starts with a keyword selection. You will need to have the best most relative keywords that people would use to find you and your services. Everything starts with a search by a user. Its that simple.
Next there should be some assessment of the website and if it matches those keywords that have been selected. This helps make sure whats in your head matches whats on the website. If the keywords and website say the same thing we are off to a good start.
Next is setting up tracking. As a business owner you must have a P&L statement of some sort to know how your finances are going. Well this is the same except you use Google Analytics to track how your website and its visitors behave.
This is a simple integration that allows the analytics dashboard to collect information and then showcase those data insights in an easy to read dashboard. You will pick up a lot of highly valuable insights just from setting this up. I have helped businesses scale to double and triple revenue by using the information shown in their Google Analytics dashboards.
Next, you will want to start working on your website content to make more use of those keywords from earlier. I can not say it enough, you must have good content on your website to grow your business with SEO. That is non-negotiable.
Warning time: Ive seen so many SEO gurus overhyping things that dont move the needle and make business owners spend thousands of dollers to get absolutely zero return on investment.
Be weary of people who cant answer your questions on the spot and have to go check with a specialist.
Be weary of people who cant explain the reports that they present to you.
The industry has a low barrier to entry and anyone who watches a couple of YouTube videos thinks they can sell this as a service. WRONG!!!
The value in SEO is simple. Create helpful web pages that answer peoples problems and offer solutions to these problems. It’s not hard to match these two, especially for a business owner.
Content plays a big part of it and then there are backlinks. This is a world onto itself. You can get lost trying to understand it. Ultimately it’s like your website is an electoral candidate and you are campaigning for likes, votes and support. Every backlink works as a vote of confidence that you are a real business that is not spammy, fake or deceiving people.
What about the backlinks?
You should be watching your backlinks (both quality and quantity) and getting more of them with every article or every piece of content you produce. For local businesses the focus is more on business directories and local news outlets and being found on them.
You want to make YOU appear to be an expert in your niche. You want people to want to link to YOUR site.
First, looking at my referring sites I have a wide range of them appearing with my keywords. Some are good, some bad. But in between there are a good 80 to 90 percent of my referring sites that are doing whatever they can to teenagers and mainly people who sharing my product or service.
Backlinks help power up pages and really douse them in fuel so that they light up and increase ranking. Backlinks are very powerful and will improve the position of a keyword in search.
All the work you do above it helps you get more visibility in Google search engine. This in turn makes your website easier to find. When you know you have more traffic, leads and sales than before you started doing SEO work that’s when you know its working.
If you have an advertising campaign running it will pay to review how the conversions are performing. I always look at the conversions, quality score, cost of click, CPA and CTR of my campaigns to understand if its time to lower my ad budget because the SEO work is doing its job.
What should SEO do to help reduce pay per click spend? the SEO work should increase your target keywords that should also be the ones you have bid on in the Google Ads platform or Facebook Ads platform.
As your SEO visibility increases you will be able to reduce the budget you spend on these paid channels. The best way to know is to review the Google Analytics monthly.
Do you want that? Who knows? Maybe you have a store or a product that will sell itself and you don’t need ads anyway.
Here’s the thing. I’m no longer sitting there thinking of how to do it I am going in and taking action. Each day something small one by one the momentum builds and the website grows. Google loves this because it shows active websites, its users want to see updated information and this is one of the signals it uses to reward a website.
My mantra is do all the things. This means do everything and make sure you have something planned to be updated on the website each week/fortnight. The more you do the more you get back. Having an idle website is not what Google wants.
The key thing for me is looking at the competitors of a business and breaking them down into topics, into commercial intent and search intent. This is how I understand the website and its offerings.
Google will be doing the exact same thing!
I don’t think SEO is hard I think it is complex to understand what is required. There is so much misinformation out there, take it from someone who has been down every rabbit hole of SEO, someone who has worked on some of the biggest websites online like 2 million page websites and household brand name websites.
Routine and logic are the keys to success with SEO
Shane Pollard
Take these notes, this guide and make it part of your teams to do list to check off the actionable items. If its all too hard then hire me to do an audit of your website where Ill uncover the biggest issues and provide you steps on how to fix them.
For now maybe start with a look inwards at your business.
What are your objectives?
What goals do you want to hit with any online activity?
Who is your actual competitor?
How do people search for your products & services?
Then when you have a crystal clear understanding of your side of the business its time to seek out a marketing agency or freelancer that can help you. The best time to engage a marketing person to do this work is when you have the basics about your goals and business locked down.
I hope this helps clear up the importance of SEO in getting your cheaper business leads and how important it really is with Google making changes and the world in a COVID pandemic. Thanks for reading.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]
I am deeply integrated into the world of ecommerce, with a knack for problem solving and computers. Marketing excites me and Im a local WA business owner trying to make it on my own.
Leave a Reply