In most businesses, it’s going to take more than SEO to start getting the phone to ring once your website is launched. If you have a small business and want to come up in a Google search, you may need a reality check to manage your expectations.
How do you know if SEO for your business is enough? You can start by checking out what it will take to get traction in search results for your industry and location.
If you have a service business without a lot of competition, then great. You’ll have a pretty good chance of easily ranking for your long-tail keywords with a reasonable about of effort. Since we are in the web design business in Atlanta, we’ve honed in on “Web Design Atlanta” as our target key phrase for our homepage. It’s relevant, and, luckily, doesn’t have an extreme amount of competition.
If you’re in a highly competitive business or one where people don’t typically hire someone by looking in a Google search then you’re in for a lot of work and even then, you may not get the results that you would like.
For example, if you own a gate company in a particular city, your competition will typically be relatively low and most likely your website will also be better designed. Given those facts, you may find it easy to rank for a long-tail keyword term like Automatic Gates by creating a web page all about automatic gates and then getting a couple of links back to that page from relevant websites, using the term “automatic gates”.
Examples of relevant websites might include commercial realtors, construction companies, or home inspectors. You could write a post about Automatic Gates and ask these other companies if they would like a guest post about automatic gates in exchange for a link back to your website. If they all accept, change up the content so that it is not seen as duplicate content by Google.
On the other hand, if you’re a business consultant, you’re going to be in for a lot of work and perhaps won’t get the results you want. For one thing, the people you probably want to work with may not look for “business consultants” in Google searches. The more professional clients will have asked around for referrals. So be careful what you ask for. You might be spending all of your time fielding calls from people who are not your target audience.
For sure, the term, business consultant, is much too general. In order to come up in a search, you’d need to get more specific. Maybe you provide a service such as HR Outsourcing. OK. Now you have a chance and people may be looking online for those services.
Once you narrow down your search terms, you’ll probably still find that your terms are still more competitive, meaning there are more businesses are in your market who are trying to come up for a particular term than the local gate company or the ADHD coach in your town.
In that case, you’re going to have to put in place a broader strategy in order to attract and close client business.
What will that strategy consist of? When you are serious about your business, put these basics into practice to get results.
- Create a WordPress website to attract and convert your target audience.
- Choose three main keywords and ten additional high-traffic keywords, as well as a list of long-tail keywords.
- Create your website pages/posts around one keyword or keyword phrase per page or post.
- Write blog posts on a weekly basis.
- Optimize the titles and meta descriptions for each page or post for its keyword phrase.
- Create internal links between the content on pages and posts to other pages and posts on your site.
- Send out your blog post updates to your mailing list on a weekly basis.
- Each week post excerpts from your blog posts to social media sites to build links back to your website.
- Determine an inbound link strategy to get links from relevant sites for your main keyword phrases.
- Speak at events, conduct webinars, do workshops, and so forth to build brand recognition and thought leadership in the real world.
When committed to your business, “build it and they will come” is not an effective strategy! But, the ten items above build on one another exponentially to create the business momentum you are looking for!
