For businesses looking to sell products or services online, SEO has always been a major factor in their marketing plans. For companies with a local, hometown brick and mortar presence, SEO has catapulted into their focus as Google and other search engines begin focusing on “local search”. So how does your company compete for the first page of Google, Bing and Yahoo for the phrases your customers search for when looking for your services?
Hire an SEO Firm
For companies with even a modest marketing budget, SEO firms have become a go-to resources. Just like companies come in all shapes and sizes, SEO firms come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some offer incredible savings over the larger SEO firms, while others meet somewhere in the middle on price and expertise, offering unparalleled focus on smaller clients that the bigger firms oftentimes look over.
Take the time to weigh your options, meet with multiple SEO firms and see if adding an SEO company to your list of outside contractors makes sense.
Social Media Is No Longer Optional
Did you know that Twitter posts have been directly linked to search engine rankings? Yep, those annoying 140 character tweets actually have an impact on how easy it is for someone to find your company or product on Google.
For a company to thrive in the information age, they must take the time to build up social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Take the time to develop attractive graphics and thoughtful posts for your social media updates. Customers are far more likely to purchase something that their friends and family are sharing on Facebook.
Create an Exciting Blog with Unique Information
Search engines crave fresh content. For a website, the easiest way to provide constantly updated information is to incorporate a blog. Posting weekly to your blog allows you to highlight the most exciting information in your industry. It’s more meaningful than sharing information on social media, because this is content that you own.
Search engine users that want access to the information you publish will need to travel to your blog to read it. This provides a strong bridge to your brand and the products you provide. It’s only natural that people researching information about a product or service are likely to purchase from a company that provides them with important information in an attractive format.
Use Site Navigation to Your Advantage
This one’s a really easy SEO hack that many have used to grow their site traffic within a matter of weeks. Go to Google and start to type in a common-sense search phrase for your products or service. If you sell candles, go to google and type in “candles for”. Google’s search box will have a dropdown of suggestions. From there you can read through what Google thinks you’re looking for. These suggestions are based off what other people typed in after typing in “candles for”.
Now take the suggestions that are relevant to you and create entire pages for your site built around these search phrases. The site navigation will tell Google what your site is about. If you have these phrases in your site navigation, along with useful content available when these navigation pages are clicked on, you’ll find that Google will reward your site with additional traffic.
