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SEO - a little goes a long way

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of altering your website to try and make it rank higher on the list of results on search engines like Google.

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It is worth your time to make sure you get it right, and to achieve a good ranking, but there’s such a thing as spending too much time on it. What your website does to convert a visitor once they have landed on it – lead magnets, nurturing leads, good CTAs – is still the most important thing.

There are some essential aspects of SEO that need to be managed. If you can get these aspects right first-time, then your time can be used more productively, while still getting the benefits of good SEO. These include:

  • Identifying keywords – these are what people are likely to use when they’re searching for a business like yours. Make a list, and incorporate them into the text on the page and the keywords meta tags. Try to come up with different, but applicable, keywords for each page. You can use the Google keyword tool to identify relevant keywords.
  • Backlinking – this this is a link on another website that links to your own. Google uses the number of backlinks to determine your ranking. If you’ve written a blog, and someone else finds that blog interesting, they’ll link to it from their site.
  • Regular updates with quality content – Google’s interested in fresh content and tends to rank it higher than a website that hasn’t been updated in months.
  • Measure SEO success – use Google Analytics to measure how effective your SEO is. As well as showing you key metrics such as how many visitors your website gets and how long your visitors stay on your site, you can also track how people find your website, the keywords they use, and the path they follow when navigating through your site. Use this information to help decide which keywords you should use.

What you could be doing instead

The idea is not to ignore SEO altogether. And it’s never a bad idea to bring in a professional who’ll optimise your site for search engines, but once it’s done, stop obsessing about it. Focus on what your website does once people have actually landed on it – that’s how you increase sales. So instead of worrying about SEO, you could be:

  • Writing a quality email newsletter to your already engaged clients, maybe asking them for referrals.
  • Emailing your prospect list you’ve built over time.
  • Having conversations with people who are already following you on social media.
  • Calling existing clients to find out if there’s anything more you can be doing to nurture that relationship.

Your focus should be on getting in front of business owners, instead of waiting for them to come to you. That’s why SEO isn’t the only online marketing tool you can use. You can have a high number of website visitors, but if they’re not buying anything or booking your service then it’s just traffic and nothing more.

Remember that increasing sales and gaining more customers is about interacting with them, which is why you should concentrate on talking to them through social media, communicating via blogging, and keeping in touch with e-newsletters and direct contact. The more you engage with your customers, the more likely they are to tell others about you, and that’s a far better long-term boost to your business than where you feature in a Google search.

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POSTED IN: Day to Day Banking,2017,Growth

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