It's no secret that ranking on Google for targeted keywords brings you huge amounts of traffic.
While this is true, getting those coveted positions is no easy task, and if someone says otherwise, you should double and triple check their qualifications and track record before you sign up.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as great things can be achieved with the right approach to your SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign.
Get Google Glasses
The key to a successful ongoing SEO campaign for small businesses is to really understand the metrics and your ROI. If you don't know what your results need to be or where they're coming from it's impossible to have a clear picture and make smart decisions.
It might sound crazy but tonnes of businesses aren't tracking their website's performance with analytics. While having a website is a great starting point, if you don't have analytics and an SEO strategy in place, you're flying blind.
Targeted keywords are essential
There are basically two types of visitors to your site: branded keyword visitors and non-branded visitors. Eg. A branded keyword search: A person that knows the name of your business and types this in as their search keyword eg: "Plus Accounting Firm". A non-branded search: Someone typing in "business accountant" as their search words.
When it comes to SEO it's all about the non-branded keywords.
Achieving page one results with these non-branded keywords exposes your business to new contacts that are searching for categories that relate specifically to your business.
Website visitors are not everything, it's all in the conversion
It doesn't matter how much traffic you get to your site if people are not responding to you as a result of visiting your site - either by email, phone or taking the desired action on your website.
The key is to work out what is working and do more of it. Google now offers a great inbuilt tool which allows you to test multiple landing pages over a period of time to see which one performs the best.
Also, if you are doing Pay Per click advertising, use different landing pages for the same campaign and see which one has the best conversion rate. You will quickly discover what is working and what isn't.
Track your lead sources - even on the phone
We might be talking digital marketing, but if your site is designed for optimum conversion in mind, the phone number should be easily seen, ideally on every page.
While it's sometimes hard to track calls, all it takes is a quick question…"how did you hear about us?" and make sure you record this in your CRM (Client Relationship Management System)
Often many phone calls will come from people that have first visited your website before they decide to call you, so don't underestimate the importance of a professionally designed website and a solid SEO strategy.
Use email to show you care
While we are talking about SEO, emailing is a key ingredient to maximise your ROI from your SEO campaign.
At the end of the day, most of your goals will revolve around increasing your database. So as your SEO is building up targeted traffic and conversions are happening, you should find your email database is increasing - now's a great time to integrate the new sign-ups into a lead-nurturing campaign.
All of this can be managed with a powerful email marketing system like ShoutMail or a CRM system like Solve360.
Conclusion
This may all seem too time consuming for many small businesses, but it's important to adopt a disciplined approach to SEO to ensure you can track your results and get maximum ROI out of your campaign and marketing spend.
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