The cost of ad clicks in all platforms has skyrocketed during 2020 and has spilled over into 2021. Organic search is the most cost effective way.
Google controls search, especially by owning YouTube. What you don’t know is Google requires proper formatting of your website and the content within your site before it shows it to people asking questions on Google. Proper technical formatting is called SEO (search engine optimization)
More and more people around the world are getting access to the internet and international eyeballs on your website sends the proper signals to Google and raises your authority, increasing your exposure locally.
Being highly visible on Google depends on two variables:
Quality SEO and
High-quality content on your website is how to achieve maximum exposure..
I am shocked to see how many websites don’t have an SSL certificate. Even after I contact the owners and let them know about this super easy fix having a huge impact on their SEO scores, the business owners don’t care and say they don’t want to buy anything. Literally, shocking to me. As if I sold SSL Certificates, I don’t.
The list of requirements for proper Google format is long, but it’s not a mystery. Technical SEO is much less difficult to get correct compared to content marketing. Here are a few of the examples of the requirements:
Relevant backlinks.
User engagement on your website (super important).
Unique and interesting Title tags, unique and irresistible meta descriptions.
Proper length of title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, etc....
Having a sitemap.xml file
Properly formatted robot.txt file (even if you want the bots to crawl all pages, it’s good to have one).
Before you get what you want, (higher rankings on Google search results and maximum visibility) you have to give Google what it wants: properly formatted content.
Google studies the behavior of your website traffic. How long did they stay on the page? Did the user scroll? Did they bounce (bounce rate is a measurable variable in Google Analytics)? Did they interact with the buttons, etc…?
When your website doesn’t have perfect SEO, the user experience suffers and Google is aware. Google is always aware.
Google has taken “user experience” to the next level by providing the searcher the answers to most questions within the Google browser. This means that Google is pulling the information from your website and creating the answer without sending the user to your website. Streamlining and providing friction-free experience. Google still gives your website credit for the answers your content provides, but it might not result in a website visit. SEO matters more now than ever. Traffic will drop, so the bar on proper SEO has been raised.
Your opinion on this matter will not matter, because Google will do what it wants, and it changes the rules to the tune of over 3000 times per year.
Mobile traffic is increasing because of voice searches and virtual assistants. When mobile search increases, it also raises local search volume due to the integration with Google Maps.
Local SEO is extremely picky and sensitive to any discrepancies of information. Your business name has to be exactly the same across all platforms. Exact spacing, spelling, exact everything. This is part of technical SEO. If you would have known this sooner, you would have cared about SEO and even learned about it.
Local SEO optimizations include helping people and responding super fast on the Google My Business platform.
SEO experts achieve perfect local SEO by maximizing your company’s website, its articles, meta tag descriptions, H1 headings, Title Tags, local citations, backlinks, and more.
Google reviews have a big impact on local SEO. Don’t seek out fake reviews. Google will find out sooner or later and will penalize your website by lowering your search rankings.
The internet facilitates research. Search engines empower consumers and educate the masses.
Incorporating SEO best practices to spread your messages speeds up the results and ROI from your hard work.
When done properly, SEO positively transforms your website, and therefore your business.
Proper local SEO increases the chances your content will be the answer to the question asked by potential customers on the internet.
SEO is not a one and done proposition. SEO is a never ending process. You might not like it, but it is the reality created by Google as they tweak, change, modify, improve, ruin… whatever you wish to call it. As I mentioned earlier in my article, Google changes the rules over 3000 times per year.
You can’t possibly run your successful business and stay up-to-date on all things SEO, unless you are a super-human. Maybe you are, but use SEO services as insurance that nothing falls through your cracks. Fair enough?
Count on the SEO experts to stay updated on the latest tweaks. And the top 4% of SEO gurus actually have proprietary workflows to keep their clients on top, literally (contact me for more info on these proprietary workflows).
I have come across companies with SEO in-house teams that hadn’t been updated in latest practices in years. Shame on the business owners that don’t know the minimum to at least know the difference between great help and mediocre help. The worst thing a leader of an organization can do is hire a mediocre person. The mediocre employee ruins the company by doing just enough to get by without getting noticed, infecting others along the way. Have mercy on the company and the mediocre employee by raising your standards and replacing them right away (touchy subject, I’m sorry about the brief rant).
It’s not free, but relative to the cost of PPC (pay per click) it’s a bargain. I’ll elaborate. Even if you want to run ads, you have to have content to distribute. So, you create articles, videos, podcasts and you pay to market them.
Ads costs a whole lot more than they used to. I remember in 2012 maximum cost per click for Maui Jim sunglasses was $1.00. My conversion rate was 10% and margin was 60%. Consumer appetite was insatiable and those metrics, my friend, are the recipe to riches. Those were my good-old-days. Cost per click is very high if you want the add the show on the 1st page.
Here is a bigger problem, Google just released an email saying it will soon combine Exact Keyword Match, Phrase Match, and Broad Match. To me, that is a big signal to invest in organic SEO because the fastest way to go broke is to give Google the power to maximize for conversion without being exact on the keywords that will trigger your ad, especially with click prices being so high.
SEO is a long term investment. SEO is a long-term strategy.
Imagine a YouTube video for example. You invest in its production and it stays there forever. It took you one hour to film the video. You invested three hours to edit the video. Then, you took two hours transcribing, writing the description, title, and photoshopping the thumbnail. Six hour investment to yield a lifetime of views. Sounds to me like great ROI.
SEO is not a mystery. SEO is an exact science that when done correctly yields perfect results.
Once the Google bots crawl your page, re-index it and it starts ranking, it begins to pay off. There are many great tools we use in the SEO community to measure and track progress. We not only measure your progress, but we also monitor and spy on your competitor’s rankings. I like to refer to that as monitoring your competitor’s regress.
Good SEO help and bad SEO help is easy to spot because SEO is technical and running an SEO audit catches the low hanging 70% of the SEO fruit. I suggest you run a weekly SEO audit and monitor every inch of progress. Get the microscope out and find ways to improve. Rewrite the title tag and make it so irresistible that searchers can’t prevent themselves from clicking and finding out what your page is about.
Set high goals. Deliver higher quality content than your competitors. Give your absolute best content to your target audience. Create content that is worth sharing (Seth Rogan’s best quote).
You can be on the first page of Google. Try harder by expecting more from your SEO expert and give them the budget that will allow them to deliver on your high, yet reasonable expectations.
