Lets say you’ve invested a lot of resources in launching your brand new website - strategy, design, development, copywriting... But you still don’t see it in the search engines, while your competition is on the top?
You’re sure about your biz niche, but you haven’t covered the web market niche? All that books, forums and scam communities can't help you. You need Content, Traffic, Sales and Loyalty.
Without them – your business is in distress. You have to clear your what-who-where-why goals before you start the process. The process is the same for a one-man-show or a Fortune 500 company:
Niche/ Idea - Business strategy - Name - Identity - Domain - Web strategy - Website - CRM - Virtual support...
It’s important to do serious keyword research before building any content or optimization. Don’t choose one-word phrase. Go to 3-5 long tail phrases to bring targeted traffic to your site, with people looking specifically for to buy your product or service. You can use lot of tools as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google keyword suggestion tool to find the best one and the competition involved with them. Only then you will imagine how much work is involved to out rank the top website for this keyword.
After you have selected 1 to 3 keywords for your webpage content you apply them throughout the page in your Domain/Filename, Title, Description, Headers, Body, Navigation, Img Alt tags, Anchor tags, Sitemap, Comments, etc. There are more than 140 on-page factors, which should make you stand out from the crowd of millions of related websites. Next, you need to get as many quality links as you can, pointing to your site with your popular keyword phrase as an anchor. More fresh, relevant, meaningful content will please both search engines and site visitors.
You should see results in 2 to 20 days - all of this is determined by where your links are coming from, and the popularity of the site from which the link came. SEO can become very tricky, especially if you do not have the necessary knowledge, understanding and skill needed in order to be able to make full use of it in order to make your online venture a successful one. A small business web site can rank well without hiring a SEO consultant, but to produce the desired results you definitely need a Pro. A good search engine optimization specialist is the one who has a detailed knowledge on what methods need to be implemented and at what time.
As a small business owner, you probably wear too many hats already to have time to learn the art and science of SEO. It's just worth it to pay a consultant for a site SEO audit and positioning. Nowadays SEO is growing and transforming with a tremendous speed. What works today may not work in one month. Search engines are changing their algorithms so often that getting top rankings has become a cruel competition, it implies professional hard work, dedication and a budget. Make sure you choose a reliable web company, one that will not throw your site into the black SEO trap, one that really can position your website (as dozens of others and their own) in Google top10.
Permanent monitoring and modification of the website are an essential part of SEO, which is cost effective and noticeable in the long run. You spend a lot of time and effort in establishing your online presence but if the effort is not able to reach out to sales it can never give the desired results. Having top search engine listings is important for any company. Everyone wants to get those good listings. Results (sales) are all that matters.
Now what?
After 6 months of fierce SEO, sales had only increased 8%? You are not alone. If you upgrade to an entire keyword market segment and redesign your website with the help of a SEO Pro, sales can be increased from 30% to more than 240%! Unfortunately many companies lack the knowledge about SEO and assume it will be cheaper for them to hire someone in-house. An SEO firm has a staff of highly trained professionals in the area of link building, writing, optimizing, web development and they are more likely to be aware of changes to search engine optimization protocols than an in-house individual. It is a part of their day to day business and necessary if they intend to compete in the marketplace and wish to survive. One individual can’t do the job of five pros. Test the company on a small project and see if they bear the desired results. SEO is a serious, time intensive and ongoing process. It cost twice as much when you do it wrong.
SEO is still the KING! It's real-time web success!
If brand management is important for your success, a strong SEO program should be your very first priority. If your website can fly, so will do your business.
SEO is not only a science, but a mindset, permanent observation and even reverse engineering. We do know know why search engines prefer this and not that.
Amateurs guess. We have to KNOW - that is our business.
Where do you get answers to SEO questions?
You can get ALL the information you need on Google's page #1 for your targeted niche, fresh and hot, as we do every day for dozens of customers on monitoring.
If you read all these aged forums, "magic sauce" ebooks and "expert" tips, You are going nowhere. They are just parting you from your time and money. Or you also think that "SEO is not a science and we do not and will never know why search engines prefer this and not that" ?
There is no static algorithm, it changes overnight, but we can monitor it even trough mobile devices in wireless (and cloudless ;-) locations.
If react on time, we can keep us top ranked for years.
SEO "experts" are cheap. SEO experts are not cheap.
Our customer's requests and questions are ALWAYS the same:
I want to be on the top! (read: I don't have a clue what I want)
Being #1 or having 7 tons of traffic means NOTHING if you don't reach at least 6% traffic-to-customer conversion.
Sometimes I got good questions. Like "What are the next steps after getting top1 on search engines?"
So, the strategy I use in most of the cases (with some web 2.0 tweaks or PPC tinkles):
1. Find and define new clusters with hundreds of hot "low-hanging-fruit" RELEVANT & WEIGHTY keywords (with good search volume) and rank #1 for them too, through relevant content and theme-rich back-links...and hundreds of other factors. We position our customer's websites in top3 for minimum 10 phrases ( but one of them yesterday was top3 for 17400 unique phrases!)
2. We grab all requests (emails, leads, complaints, orders, bookings, subscriptions, job/partner applications, etc.) IN an integrated web based CRM system all on the same page. We train their marketing team how to generate, blast and track calls-to-action weaved CONTENT trough direct marketing campaigns and offline Brand strategy.
3. We nudge them to Analyze in real time the bottom line results/ trends / best channels and team / Brand performance. If you don’t have a BI dashboard within 1 meter, you are going NOWHERE.
Easy as 1-2-3. Isn't it ? ;-)
Brand 2008: when CRM meets WEB 2.0 & SEO
Cheers to all innovators around! See ya at the SEs top!
Yours BrandMover
P.S. The Moral? If You & Your Business are not automated, those who are (and live in the BPM/ SoA world) will leave you in the dust!
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Contributor's Note
I wrote this intel as an anwer to all SEO questions received today.
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