An SEO Primer For Small To Medium-Sized Businesses

An SEO Primer For Small To Medium-Sized Businesses

Too often internet marketing or SEO specialists speak to business in technical language when discussing the benefits of Search Engine Optimization. When in reality business owners want to know is “What’s In It For Me”. The net result of SEO is increased business developed in a highly cost-efficient manner. Having an effective, consistent SEO process is just as important to a business as having full-page ads in city-wide and local community Yellow Pages was 25 years ago. I can’t imagine one business owner saying “I don’t like that”.

But here are the challenges to that….it’s a long and probably somewhat mysterious process to get to the benefits. So we explain Search Engine Optimization to business owners is with the following analogy:

Developing a strong and productive (increased business and revenues) online search presence is like creating a business’s reputation. When you ask business owners about why they are successful you will hear many answers. However, almost all will agree that a major part of their success is from having a great reputation for things like:

* Great Customer Service

* Ethical Business Practices

*A Strong Value Proposition

*Fantastic, Well Trained Employees

* Offering Great Products and/or Services

And Most Important is That with All These Factors They Are Better at Them Than Their Competition.

So, what the process of developing a great business reputation and developing a strong, effective search presence have in common is they take time to develop. Both take a persistent and consistent approach. Business owners understand that they need to do all the basics well every day to develop and keep a great reputation with customers. They will tell you that they did all these important factors from almost the day they opened. However, it took months and often years to be well known for that reputation in the community they serve. And most would admit that it’s a daily battle to hold on to that great reputation.

The process to develop a highly effective search presence is very similar to what I described is needed to create and hold on to a great business reputation. Effective search engine optimization takes a daily, long-term process! It includes but is not limited to:

* Writing great website content that is SEO friendly.

* Posting SEO friendly Blogs monthly on your website.

*Creating high-value backlinks every month.

* Writing strong page titles and effective Meta descriptions.

* Having consistent, accurate business listings on search engines with enough breadth and depth to create prominence and relevance. Icommotion utilizes an Online presence Management Dashboard to develop and maintain these listings (citations).

*Post weekly on social media with a strong cadence rather than just using social media to sell product.

* Focus on keywords/phrases that drive traffic that is both sizable and potentially profitable. At iCommotion, we discover the best keywords to target through an in-depth research process.

* Make sure that once you get on page one that your snippets (search results) achieve a high click-through rate and that when people do click that they spend a lot of time reading your content. This is so important with Google’s use of Rank Brain.

* Is your website optimized to load quickly? Google’s research shows that anything slower than 3 seconds causes potential customers to leave before they even see your website.

* Making sure you have an accurate way to track the results from your search traffic once you develop it. Icommotion has a multi-step process for this alone.

Like developing a strong reputation, search engine optimization not only takes a multi-faceted process, but it takes a consistent long-term approach. At iCommotion, we counsel clients that it usually takes 6-9 months to get several important keywords/phrases onto page one and of greatest importance, positions 1-3. It’s those first 3 spots on any search results that gain 90% of the clicks to a website. And this doesn’t even factor in the concept of Rich Snippets, the new position Zero. But that’s a topic for a whole other blog!

But, just like building a strong reputation, developing a great search presence is well worth the time and expense! In the end, the least expensive way to drive high-quality traffic to your website. Organic search traffic has proven to have the strongest ROI of any type of marketing.

Icommotion uses a very strong, proven process to grow a business’s online search presence. Our SEO strategy factors in both local search and organic search development tactics to grow high-quality traffic to your website that will turn into new customers. And we provide transparency to both our process and the results we provide through on-going reporting; daily, weekly, and monthly. We even provide our clients with a link to an unbiased outside keyword ranking tracking platform that provides our clients with accurate ranking for their targeted keywords on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

So, as a business owner if the concept of growing strong, profitable online search traffic that develops new customers regularly intrigues you, then call iCommotion (303-955-6303). We will send you an in-depth SEO analysis for your small to medium-sized business to start our discussions.