I’m known for asking business owner clients, “Is that activity having a direct impact on profitability?” SEO is one activity that has a direct and profound impact on your profitability. If you’ve been leaving SEO to the experts, or worse yet, ignoring it, you might want to take a deeper look because if your website doesn’t pop up on the first page of a Google search, you’re losing tons of business.
You’ve no doubt heard people talk about search algorithms and Google gives their updates cool names like Florida and Hummingbird. But what are these exactly? For most business owners it makes sense to outsource or hire for marketing expertise, but there are profitability related reasons to have a basic understanding for yourself.
- SEO is too important – your profitability and in many cases your company’s very existence depends on it. You can pay a lot of money to get a beautiful website but if it’s not search engine-optimized, you’ve wasted your money. A couple of years ago I hired a marketing company who specialized in marketing for business coaches. They built a better website than the one I’d had previously so I was happy with it. Until it continued NOT to appear on page 1, 2, OR 3 of Google searches. Digging deeper I learned they omitted basic SEO strategies, many of which are transparent; they simply hadn’t built them into our site. Things like the title tabs on the home page didn’t contain any keywords, neither did the dozens of pictures on the site, none of which were captioned.
- SEO parameters change continuously – a lot. You want to be educated enough to hire the right experts and talk intelligently to them. Google changes its algorithms about 40 – 50 times a month according to Hubspot! Its hard to know what’s current or outdated and you could waste a lot of time and money—another SEO bite out of your profitability. And if you write any of your own content, like blog posts, you want to be aware of things like optimum keyword densities, title and URL lengths and verbiage, meta description specifics, subheadings, and so on.
- There’s a lot of misinformation out there, even among SEO practitioners… and so-called black hat practices such as hidden text and keyword stuffing. Chances are you’ve already been contacted by a practitioner who’s not totally above-board.
A valued business partner and friend, Jon Eickman of Roots.Marketing in Indianapolis created a 1-page document called “Simple SEO—3 Things You Can Do in 2015.” It’s geared for business owners who want to get more into their own search engine optimization without having to get a web development degree. You can read it in 5 minutes and it’ll give you a good overview of what SEO is and some quick ways you can make sure your’s is on the right track. Click here to view the post or to download your own pdf version.
If you found anything valuable in this post, if you comment below (and include your website url), it’ll boost your SEO and mine!
