If you’re an entrepreneur or marketer chances are you keep hearing about this SEO (Search Engine Optimization) buzz word that keeps flying around. You know you need this internet marketing called SEO but you’re not really sure why. The reality is that every business whether they sell products online or not needs SEO. It’s not enough to just post content in a traditional print style anymore as Google’s put out an algorithm that devalues pages that aren’t relevant to searchers on the internet. What this means is that even if you’re fortunate enough to be found in one of the trillion plus known sites crawled by Google chances are if you’re not writing your content for both engaged users and search engines you’re not going to be too successful online. The reason for this is Google uses click data to determine relevance and search query rankings. When a user immediately leaves (bounces) due to irrelevant information the page is devalued in search rankings. This is a large part of why traditional writers don’t perform well on search engines. While there are over 200 constantly changing ranking signals there’s definitely a right and wrong way to brand your company online and it’s with SEO. Good branding means being first, selling your company well, and a website does this 24 hours a day 365 days a year even while you sleep.
What this all boils down to is that if you don’t control your brand online with SEO someone else will be in the front of the crowd talking about your brand, product, or service offering. If you’re not on the front page in the top search rankings for search queries you might as well be a guy at the back of a concert without a mic expecting to be heard. While many major brands don’t sell products online they do sell their brands and this is often worth millions if not billions of dollars to them in store. If you’re always at the back of people’s mind then you’re the company people are most likely to go to first. It doesn’t matter whether you sell jeans with a popular brand label or you sell buildings the presence you have first makes you the expert. In fact, a study shows that for every dollar spent online six is spent in-store. With Canada being the highest number of users online per capita in the world chances are you want your company to have a strong SEO campaign to put your brand in front of the crowd.
If you don’t have SEO just think of the BP and Toyota in the last year. Two entirely different scenarios and two entirely different results. BP’s message was dominated by the media but with Toyota they managed to dominate their PR especially using SEO to respond to an engaged audience looking for answers. Business is changing and chances are if people hear something about a company the first place they look is online. If they find your information first for popular queries the law of reciprocity shows that they’re more likely to work with you in the future. Consider most clothing brands. While most people don’t buy all their clothes online the value from powerful branding and presence selling the sizzle makes them more desirable. Without SEO you’re a pamphlet to the wind and nobody is going to see your message.
If you want to market yourself properly online you need a:
- Marketing Plan to start with a market-directed vision based on competitive analysis, content strategies, and focused KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
- Custom Designed Website to reflect your company vision and target market
- Managed SEO to target engaged searchers and search engines
- Managed SEM (Search Engine Marketing) to target specific audiences across specific demographics across the web
- Managed Marketing Science to define key growth areas, improve on them and build on areas where the site content is weak so your company is always improving.
