How can you improve your search engine optimization?

By / Enterprise

If you’re looking to draw more customers to your business and ultimately reap more profits, the most effective path to success is to draw more traffic to your website. Once people browse your site and discover the benefits of your products and services, the rest is easy. Initiating conversation is half the battle, though, and bringing people into your site is often the hard part.

It’s difficult to make people visit your website. Conventional wisdom says a lot of methods might work, but a lot of the common strategies are ineffective. Email marketing? Social media blasts? Advertisements? People don’t respond well to any of the above, really.

Search Engine Watch recently reported on the difficulty of bringing in valuable customers via the web, citing survey data from the customer acquisition platform Custora. The firm discovered that there’s a clear correlation between the way a customer is recruited and the eventual lifetime value of that customer. Email marketing was a somewhat viable strategy, with a positive effect of plus 12 percent on lifetime value. Banner ads were weak, adding just 1 percent – Facebook was also at 1 percent, and Twitter had a starkly negative value, detracting 23 percent.

Organic searches were by far the best way of bringing in customers – according to Custora’s data, people who found businesses by actively searching them out were 54 percent more valuable than the average customer. If you think about it, that makes perfect sense. The most loyal customers aren’t the ones who need to be wheedled by salespeople – they’re the ones who take initiative for themselves because they’ve known all along that they want a product.

With all this in mind, there’s a lesson to be learned here – the best strategy for marketing your business isn’t advertising, but rather, it’s improving the search engine optimization (SEO) value of your site. With that in mind, read on for a few search engine optimization tips.

Look locally and globally

There are two different kinds of SEO you should consider – optimizing your site for people in your local area to find it, and reaching out to far corners of the globe as well. Rand Fishkin, founder of marketing software company Moz, told Entrepreneur Magazine that when looking for an SEO consultant, you should look for someone who specializes in local rankings. By making sure people who Google your industry in your town find you, you can bring more customers into your brick-and-mortar location.

Improve your rankings

SEO is a quantifiable resource. You should be tracking the progress of your SEO initiatives, looking at how your site ranks in terms of certain highly searchable keywords, and how it compares in these areas to competing businesses in your area. Always be monitoring your progress, and if you don’t see results, you shouldn’t be afraid to change your approach.

Be realistic

You want to improve your standing, but you can’t expect to be No. 1 in every category. In fact, Vanessa Fox, founder of SEO software provider Nine By Blue, told Entrepreneur that businesses should steer clear of any consultant who promises these types of instant results.

“Turn and run in the other direction as fast as you can,” Fox said.

If someone makes promises that are too good to be true, they’re probably not.

Measure your success

When you invest time and money into your SEO efforts, you always want to know whether they’re working or not. Don’t be afraid to spend on analytical tools that can track your progress. They may be expensive, but it’s better to spend a few bucks than be left in the dark about your progress.

These guidelines will help you proceed with confidence into the world of SEO. What strategies have worked for you?

 

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