There are those that will tell you that you should just worry about your content and social media marketing; that SEO really isn’t all that important. Listening to these schools of thought just may be a sure fire way, in the end, to drive you out of business. SEO is, and will remain, the overall critical strategy to your long term success.
Unconvinced? Then consider this:
- Nearly 95% of all online excursions begin at a search engine.
- Almost 80% of visitors to a search engine ignore the ads on the SERP pages.
- Over 75% of all users at a search engine will never click on to the second page of results.
Everything begins and ends with your SEO marketing strategy. What SEO does, simply, is translate your website so it can be easily understood by those who may be looking for what you have to sell. The major challenge that many small businesses face is that the owners believe they are competent enough, and have all of that extra time, to do their own SEO. So, what ends up happening is that they become discouraged because they discover that SEO marketing is a full time and long term commitment and that they really need a trained and professional team to get the most out of it.
The first blunder they tend to make is on the keyword front. Keywords remain critical even though their importance has been somewhat eclipsed by content yet it is your content that will contain your keywords and phrases. Most of the amateurs are still keyword stuffing and are not migrating toward the more extensive use of latent semantic indexing which, for the most part, is the use of long tail search phrases. You wander much over a 3-4% density on your keywords and Google will, most assuredly, stomp on you. The smart money these days is on the 1-2% density range.
Many amateurs won’t take advantage of using anchor text to lead their visitors to other exciting content on their site. The anchor text is underlined and is a direct link to getting them where you want them to go which is to their shopping cart and a conversion. And, speaking of links, building back links has now become one of the most formidable SEO tools you can use to boost your ranking and your credibility as a brand yet far too many small business owners are ignoring this strategy, doing it wrong, or not getting any professional help with it at all.
Finally, too may are just relying on the “likes” and “friends” out on their social media platforms. The cold water truth is that the number of followers and “friends” you have doesn’t mean anything. You are likely the only one who cares about that. What really needs to happen is that your SEO needs to throw focus into producing engaging and helpful content that all of your “friends” will share so as to increase your brand awareness and possibly boost your traffic numbers.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer