Everything you do contributes to your SEO
I was having a chat with a young business on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon.
Like many new businesses, they were receiving a deluge of well-meaning and not so well-meaning advice. Sifting through it all was making their brain ache.
I felt for them. It’s difficult to know who to trust while you strive to get through the early years (and I’m not saying my advice below is right for all, but it may be right for some of you).
One piece of advice they have repeatedly received is to get someone in to sort their SEO. Without which their business will fail. A bit dramatic.
But who can they trust? Is it worth it when budgets are tight and they have to think about every penny they spend?
They then went on to tell me how they loved having a stall at the Frome Independent. They loved meeting people, telling their story and listening to enthusiastic feedback. It felt natural. Like their product. And an added bonus? Website visits, social media engagement and sales always boomed after market day.
So my advice to them was:
“The best thing you can do for your SEO is being at the Frome Independent.”
What would take months, even years, to build using best SEO practices is done in a day.
What does SEO do?
It gets your website higher up the search engines and encourages people to visit your website.
But it has a bit of a bad reputation. For good reason - all those cold calls and spam emails from disinterested and remote SEO companies offering dodgy short-term solutions that have little relevance to your business. They say being on page one of Google will deliver unparalleled growth.
But there are two problems with this:
1. Are the search terms they work on useful?
and
2. Is being on page one of Google as useful as you think it is?
Recent research has been done on this and it makes for eye-opening reading. Up to 40% of page one of Google search contains their own curated results.
In 2004, co-founder Larry Page said “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.”
But they now want to keep you on their search pages as long as possible. As with Facebook, it’s all about keeping you where they want you, amassing your data and encouraging you to click on their ads.
This means the first organic listings can be half way down page one. Now you need to either pay for the privilege of being near the top with AdWords, or pursue other strategies.
What is the best way to attract people to your website?
Too many businesses think SEO is all they need to do when in fact it’s only a small part of their marketing strategy.
Yes, you need to optimise your website and ensure that:
Metatags* accurately describe each page
Images have alt-tags**
Pages load fast
Content is interesting, useful and readable (but not stuffed with keywords)
That’s good business practice and makes the website more accessible.
But in isolation it can have minimal impact on your business. SEO is only one part of a far bigger marketing effort that includes both online and traditional marketing.
You have to experiment and decide how to best allocate your time and budget to get the biggest impact.
Everything you do contributes to your SEO.
It could be a social media post, a blog, a networking event, a market stall, a person you meet at a party, or something you do for the community. Any of these actions could encourage someone to link to or visit your website. This in turn improves your search engine rankings. You need to work out what works best for you.
If you can get your name out there using traditional means go for it. It’s worth much, much more than getting bogged down in the minutiae of technical SEO. Leave that to big business with big budgets who don’t know their customers personally.
If you do know your customers, then talk to them. Meet them. Follow your instinct. Prioritise activities that come natural to you. Be authentic to yourself. It will earn the respect and the loyalty of your customers.
For this young business, being at the Frome Independent market had the biggest impact on getting to page one of Google. What’s yours?
* Meta tags are essentially little snippets of text that help tell search engines what a web page is about. They aren’t published, but are in the source code.
** Alt-tags provide a text alternative for images so that the search engines know what the photo is about. They also helps screen readers explain to visually impaired people the content of an image.
A footnote: Not all SEO agencies are bad. Unless that’s all they offer. There are reputable digital marketing agencies who will help you rank higher with long-term strategies that help your customers, rather than try to trick the search engines.
