You’ve spent a heap of time and money on your website so you can attract more customers, but the problem is no one’s finding your website without you having to spend money on advertising and social media.
Discover what SEO can do for the growth of your business, whether you need to bother with it, and how to get started when it’s about as exciting as listening to your kid’s recorder solo for the 50th time.
Resources
Kate Toon’s The Recipe for SEO Success
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Podcast Transcript: Why SEO is Important For Business
Nicci O’Mara
You’ve spent a heap of time and money on your website so you can attract more customers, but the problem is no one’s finding a website without you having to spend money on advertising and social media. And you’re wondering how did your competitors make it to page one of the Google search and your prospective customers are now talking to your competitors instead of you? It’s time I share with you a few realities about search engines and the mistakes I’ve made along the way.
Hello and welcome to the Simply Standout Marketing Podcast. It’s wonderful to have you here with me today. In this episode, I want to give you a little insight into SEO. Yes. Search engine optimisation. Well, I want to tell you what it can do for the growth of your business and how to get started when it’s about as exciting as listening to your kids record a solo for the fiftieth time and more confusing than figuring out nutritional information on food labels.
So let’s start with a little refresher. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is all about applying the right strategies to your website in order to rank higher in the organic search results and therefore increase your organic traffic. And that’s the stuff you don’t pay for, which is gold. Google’s organic search results account for more traffic than all of the other sources of traffic combined, like Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Bing.
Search engines like Google, they like answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of online content via a process known as crawling and indexing. And then they start, they rank them in order, based on hundreds and hundreds of factors which change every year, all in a matter of milliseconds. This is where SEO is vital because it’s the process of looking at the factors that affect your search ranking and working on improving them so that you rank higher in organic searches. I’ve learnt the hard way, the very hard way, that ignoring investing in SEO for your website early on affects the growth of your business, especially when you don’t have huge wads of cash to splash around on advertising.
Years ago, I set up an online travel business to help parents make it easier to take extraordinary international vacations with their kids. Apart from the fact that covid totally killed that dream, my biggest mistake was not concentrating on SEO from the very start. There was so much to do to get the business started, plus, I had consulting work on top that I just did the very basics of SEO. And then once I got serious about SEO bit later on, I realised how many leads and sales I’d missed out on.
But the good news is it’s never too late to start. So let’s talk about why you need to take CEO seriously and how you can get started. Now, the main reason why you need to invest in improving your SEO is to drive more people to your website. The majority of website traffic, as I said, comes from Google’s organic results, not from Facebook, YouTube or even your, paid Google ads. If people can’t find you through a quick Google search, then you’re missing out on a whole lot of business.
You need to drive more people to your website if you want the chance to convert them into leads and sales. Yes, you do need to have clear and powerful messaging calls to action, and all the other essential elements of a high converting website. But, you need to get people there first. The second reason that you really need to work on your SEO is that it builds brand authority and trust. People are much more likely to trust you when you appear organically on the first page of search results, then if you pay for a spot to get on there.
And when it’s easier to find you own search engines, it’s easier to improve your brand awareness because being a small business has its challenges. And one of them is how to make people understand who you are and the products or services that you’re offering. And imagine being on the first page of a Google search result. When someone looks for products and services related to your business, your website will be one of the first few pages someone clicks and the chances of you gaining a new customer is higher, especially when you have high converting messages, sales funnels and great looking website.
Now, the third reason to invest in an SEO strategy is because SEO is cheaper in the long run. Yes, it’ll cost you to develop the right content for the tools and the strategy, but it works out cheaper than pay per click advertising. It also should provide you with content that your audience sees as being valuable, therefore building trust and connection and giving you something of value to provide via emails and social media as well. Now, being on the first page of a search result means you have outranked your competitors, and, as long as you continue managing your website SEO effectively, you’ll hopefully stay up there for quite some time.
Unfortunately, it’s not a set and forget. That’s why we marketers talk about the benefits of blogs and updating a website constantly. OK, so now you know the benefits of increasing traffic to your website, building your brand authority and reducing your search advertising costs. But what are some of the things that will actually improve your search engine rankings? Well, the short answer is your SEO ranking improves when your website contains compelling content that anchors the search query, so, that what someone puts into a Google search bar, the keywords, the phrase, how to do something.
It also improves when a keyword optimised, when it’s keyword optimised, so that search engines and people can find the answers that we’re looking for. So if people are looking for the fastest car, if you had a blog post or your website home page or something that actually said, you know, fastest car in Sydney, Australia, and that was the search term that they were using, well, that is going to help you to actually rank higher. Now, Google value sites that are user friendly and load quickly, they don’t want to be sending people to clunkier websites that don’t provide value as it makes them look bad too.
Now, your ranking improves when visitors stay on your site for longer, they click through to a few more pages and when they come back for more. So the more user friendly your site is, the more likely you are to rank higher. And then we start looking at factors like do people like sharing your content, say on Facebook? Are there links to and from other reputable websites? Are there effective internal links within your site, you know, going from one page to the next?
And are your URL’s Medda descriptions and things along those lines, are they keyword optimised? Do they have keywords in them? And lastly, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, you can forget about ever seeing page one of a Google search. Look, I know it sounds complicated and confusing and time consuming, but it is worth it. And you do need to do it if you want to actually rank on organic searches. I remember when I first heard words like Medda Description’s and Serp and Slug, I thought to myself, I will never understand this, but I persisted and kept learning.
And now it comes very easily, surprisingly so. Your next step is to start taking action. There are two ways to do this. You can do it yourself and invest your time in an SEO course, like Kate Toon’s highly regarded online course, called the recipe for SEO success. SEO isn’t something you can just learn by reading a blog article or using common sense. You’re going to need more, or you can save yourself the stress and time and get a reputable, and I mean reputable, SEO trained website copyrighter to review what you’ve got and provide recommendations and a strategy to improve your SEO in line with your marketing goals. That’s really important.
Listen to Kate Toon’s interview – How to Increase Organic Traffic to your Website – Episode 37 of the Simply Standout Marketing Podcast <LINK TO EPISODE>
This is something we do really well. So if you need help, just get in contact. Otherwise, keep listening to the Simply Standout Marketing Podcast for more on SEO, on websites, and all things marketing, to help you stand out and succeed. Thanks so much for listening. If you love what you’ve just heard, please share this podcast with your friends, family and colleagues. Thanks so much.
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