While You Fret About SEO Your Business Is Suffering

We're doing some interesting testing on our website just now around the much misunderstood (and misremembered) subject of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. We're showing some visitors an offer for some paid consultancy, a tailored SEO workshop and a low-cost SEO retainer, while others are being offered a FREE SEO quick start guide.

Not surprisingly the free offer is way more popular than the paid consultancy. The reason this isn't a surprise is people like getting something for free, and with search marketing having such a poor reputation it's not hard to see why some businesses want to go down the DIY route instead of hiring an agency to help them with their search marketing. But at what price?

Search Marketing Isn't Hard But It's Hard Work

We don't make any claims about having some sort of SEO secret sauce. In fact, we play fast and loose with any and all the SEO information we can find. We ping information out on a daily basis telling people how to do search and use the inbound marketing methodology to turn their website's into lead generation assets. But still business owners hunt for low effort cheap solutions to propel their websites up the rankings. It's a tad frustrating.

Tick Tock Tick Tock

Every day, week, month spent looking for quick and cheap solutions is a day, week or month your competitors are building their lead on you in Google's search results. Every email you send asking "How many links do you guarantee" to dodgy providers of search services is another nail in your business's heart, is it not time to stop and do it properly?

Take A Breath and Create A Search Strategy

Here's how it works. To rank in Google for competitive search phrases you need to create a website that deserves to rank. Sites that deserve to rank have earned their rankings by understanding their customers and their customers' needs and have created genuinely useful or even remarkable content that helps and informs. Give or take some technical stuff that's what you need to do, nothing more, nothing less.

To get traffic, generate leads, beat your competition and create a steady stream of enquiries you need to create an amazing website and tons of amazing helpful content. It's not about buying tons of rubbishy links, it's not about cramming your meta tags with a million keywords and most importantly, there is no quick fix.

Start with the following and figure out:

Who your customers are (buyer personas).
What they search for (what problems are they trying to solve).
Who you’re competing against and how to compete with them.
What success looks like (eg. 10 new customers per month).
What’s preventing you from securing the traffic you need to achieve success.
What’s good and bad about your website from a lead generation point of view.
Establish KPI’s
Create a strategic roadmap

If you do all this you'll be well placed. If you can't, hire an agency who can help.