Tips From Digital Marketing Experts

There’s no point selling the best products in town if your storefront is down a back alley and in a basement. Likewise, the website that showcases your services needs to be easily discovered by those looking for them. With 63,000 Searches Happening per Second, Google is the equivalent of the busy shopping mall location that will be seen by your perfect customers. But to get into that sought-after position among the rest, you’re going to need a great SEO Strategy.

This guide to SEO will give you an overview of what that means.

How Important is Google Really?

Whatever you’re selling, people are Googling it. More than half of them will click on the top three search results, and a whopping 92 percent of all people will click a link on the first page. If you’re not on the first page of Google’s SERP, you’re in that basement down the back alley. Investing in a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategy is one of the smartest things you can do for your business.

Pay per Click (PPC) vs. Organic Optimization

You could pay for a Google Ads campaign for instant exposure, but it will cost you every time someone clicks through – and will stop working the moment you stop paying. Ranking organically is harder to do but it’s a superior long-term strategy. Once you’re up there, the clicks won’t cost you anything, you’ll reap a higher ROI, and those rewards will last a long time. You can either throw money at a quick fix or invest in a long-term strategy that offers higher conversion rates and lower ongoing costs.

Where do People Click?

The average search engine user is getting smarter about how Pay-Per-Click (PPC) works, and most scroll past the ads, knowing that they represent companies who paid for their positioning rather than leading the industry through quality content. Our eyes are becoming trained to simply ignore PPC results along with banner ads and pop-ups.

Highly ranked organic results suggest you’re an influential player in your field; they receive more clicks and result in more traffic and more sales, more of the time.

Prove It!

Another advantage of SEO is that every aspect of it is measurable. There is a plethora of Easy-To-Use Tools that will help you evaluate where your customers are taking action. Data and statistics obtained from the web mean you can continually evaluate and adapt your approach for optimal results.

What are the Elements of Good SEO?

While ever-changing, Google uses over 200 factors in their ranking algorithms, with varying levels of influence. For simplicity, we’ll divide these into on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is the easiest to manipulate. The factors that improve your position here include:

• The Quality, Originality, and Freshness of your Content;
• The relevance and placement of keywords;
• Visitor engagement, including length and frequency of visits;
• The overall architecture, including URL design and HTML elements; and
• Page Optimization, including page loading speed.

Off-page SEO can be a little more complicated to manage and deals largely with the “perceived authority” and trustworthiness of your site. It is influenced by:

• The number and quality of links to your website;
• The diversity, relevance, and authority of linking sites;
• User reviews and site reputation;
• The age and history of your website; and
•  Mentions of your brand elsewhere on the internet.

Your Digital Marketing Team

Developing optimal SEO requires Team Collaboration. An SEO team might consist of five or six different specialists working on a single project, and could include a web developer, a web designer, a graphic designer, a marketing manager, content writers and editors, guest blogger outreach managers, data analysts, and a project manager. Everyone needs to be current with recent developments in this field, and working together cohesively.

Sounds Complicated!

Unless this is your area of expertise, it probably is complicated! This is one area where you don’t want to make mistakes, take shortcuts, or hire a cheap SEO rookie that leaves your website damaged from a Google penalty. One bad choice or attempt to cheat the algorithm could send your website’s SEO value plummeting and, like your high school GPA, it can take a lot of time and investment to recover your position once this has happened. SEO costs can vary greatly and there is such a thing as affordable SEO, but don’t fall victim to cheap SEO! 

Hiring a specialist consultant or agency is the most efficient and effective way of handling your company’s SEO. If you’re serious about improving your company’s Google standing, contact the digital marketing experts at Agency Partner Interactive to discuss your needs today.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “CEO’s 5 Minute Guide to SEO” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!