If you're considering spending some of your marketing budget on an SEO campaign, these FIVE tips will ensure you spend your money wisely.
Although SEO is often the right thing to do as part of your marketing strategy, it's essential to understand the likely impact of this type of work. For example, a well-executed SEO campaign will deliver long-term value but rarely any short-term gains.
This means SEO isn't the right solution if you need to generate some business quickly, but it's a great way to secure your future pipeline of enquiries. Follow these five tips by Dave Robinson, an SEO strategist at Red Evolution, a Scottish SEO agency, and you can't go wrong.
Tip One
Decide when you need to see the results of your efforts. If you're busy and getting plenty of business opportunities, you're ideally placed to consider an SEO campaign. However, if you need the phone to ring now, other ways to generate business are better suited to your needs, including paid search and paid social media.
SEO is seldom the right solution if you're in a crisis because business has dried up. Instead, think of it as a great way of ensuring business doesn't dry up in the first place!
Tip Two
Don't jump straight into tactics; first, create a sound strategy. Where SEO is concerned, there are many tactics to employ. For example, you can write blogs to help with SEO, optimise existing pages, spend time on outreach to secure backlinks, and so on.
These tactics make sense, but only as part of a bigger picture and a strategic approach to SEO. But what does an SEO strategy look like?
Like most marketing, an SEO strategy starts by understanding your customers' needs. From there, you can research what they type into Google when looking for solutions, and this will then guide your content creation efforts. This leads to the third tip.
Tip Three
Be realistic about the effort required to see the results you're expecting.
Let's say you've established what your ideal customers type into a search engine when looking for a service you offer. You might think all you need to do at this point is write a few 500-word blog posts, and you'll be home and dry. Unfortunately, many people take this approach and can't understand why they don't achieve the expected results.
To avoid this situation, take the time to understand the quality of the web pages currently ranking for the search terms you're chasing.
For example, if the first 10 results for the search or keyword phrase you want to rank for are 3000-word detailed articles, complete with graphics and maybe even videos, then a 500-word blog post is unlikely to cut the mustard.
So many people are disappointed when their SEO campaign is unsuccessful, but it's because they have been unrealistic about the effort needed.
Tip Four
Pick the right fights. There are SEO tools that will help you understand your website's authority and the authority of the websites you want to outrank.
Search engines like Google score websites by how much they trust them and award them an appropriate authority score. Sites with high authority are easier to rank than sites with low authority, but the actual score is relative to the search term and results page.
This means you must understand the authority of the pages currently ranking for your chosen search terms. If the pages currently dominating the results are all high authority and your site has low authority, you've got a problem.
Now, it's worth saying that sites with low authority can secure high-ranking pages if the page really knocks it out of the park, but it's tough. So, like with Tip Three, you need to be realistic about ranking above well-established pages with solid trust signals.
Tip Five
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important tip, don't invest in an SEO campaign if you haven't planned to keep investing. Unlike traditional advertising, where a campaign has a start and an end, the effects of SEO compound the more you do.
A single campaign is unlikely to significantly impact your website traffic, but if you keep investing, the overall effect can be incredible. It's often been said that SEO is the gift that keeps on giving because today's efforts can generate business for years to come.
Hopefully, you're now much clearer about deciding if an SEO campaign is right for your business. If it is, and you do it correctly, your business will benefit hugely.
