by Jimena Cortes
You don’t have to spend alot of time in the world of Search engine optimization to know that there’s a lot of contradictory information about it on the web. As an SEO Firm, what is common knowledge to us reads like black magic rocket science to someone else.
And while SEO is a constantly changing profession, mostly due to the hundreds of algorithm changes that search engines do every year, it’s hard to tell what to do and what not to do. Unless of course, you are an expert. So here are some things everyone should know about this mysterious yet highly important way of marketing your business.
1. Consider SEO Before Designing Your Site.
If you come to Wizard Media right after a new redesign and ask us to fix your designer’s errors, we may have to charge you more than we would had you come to us first. Why? Well, for making us work more.
The time to think about and plan for SEO is before you’ve launched or redesigned your Web site. This needs to happen before all those content pages are created and decided upon where they should go. So many people think of SEO as something to consider after the site is built, but what they don’t realize is that page structure, content and code all play into SEO. If your new flashy expensive site is not SEO friendly, then if you want search engine traffic you may have to build a whole other site. Therefore, hire an SEO before you build your site so you avoid this common mistake.
2. SEO is a Not an Overnight Process.
There are plenty of marketing tactics that you can employ today and see results as tomorrow. Search engine optimization is not one of them. SEO is an investment into the health of your site that will get stronger with time; it’s NOT an overnight solution. Although this process does require patience, the payoff is well worth it. SEO gets 3 times more traffic than PPC advertising, conversion rates are typically higher and effects of continual traffic last longer. With PPC the minute your budget runs out, so does not your ad. This is not so with a proper SEO campaign.
3. Just because you read it on a blog or in a forum doesn’t make it true
Read. Verify. Test.
Always.
So many people think they know search engine optimization and in fact they just read some information on blogs or forums which they mistook for Gospel. Guess what, half of the people on the right say “X”, while half of the people on the left say “Y”. Especially in this business, there are many conflicting opinions of what works and what doesn’t, so before you think you can optimize your own site because you read on a forum all you need are “do follow” links, then think again.
4. Your keywords are what matters most
You can’t pick keywords out of the air and decide that those are the ones you’d like to rank for. Because some keywords just aren’t worth going after. Either because you don’t have the resources to go after them or because they’re not the keywords that are going to convert for you and deliver ROI. As an SEO client, you don’t need to know the total ins and outs of keyword research, that’s why you’ve hired an SEO consulting firm, but do know the basics. You should understand that rankings mean nothing unless they convert site traffic into paying customers. However, sometimes even if you choose the right keywords, if your website sucks, visitors still wont convert no matter how much traffic you get…
5. Today, it’s not whether you’ll invest in SEO, it’s when and how
If you have a Web site that you want to use to increase prospects or leads to your business, then SEO is something that you need to make an investment in. So you can stop having that pointless mind battle with yourself about what to do to bring in new customers and whether SEO will work or not,and use that energy to decide HOWyou will integrate SEO into the core of your business. Let yourself be found by prospects right as they are looking for what you have to offer to solve their problems. What other marketing tactic is more powerful than that?
