Are you looking for higher rankings and traffic through SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Matt Spivak, Marketing Consultant with Uptick Marketing, recently taught a Forge webinar about SEO strategy for local businesses. You can view the recording here. Let’s hit the highlights for you!
Did you know Google receives approximately 63k searches every second?
And 3 out of 4 people searching don’t bother going past the first page.
Did you know that 3 out of 4 people who conduct a local search (“near me”) will visit a store within 5 miles of their current location?
Evaluating Your SEO
Step 1: Understand Your Current Situation
- Ask yourself some questions:
- What marketing efforts are we currently doing? Is it generating much search volume? How do we know?
- Is our marketing actually making us money? How do we measure this?
- What is the lifetime value of a new customer?
- Where can we earn some easy wins?
Step 2: Is your site mobile friendly?
- Is your mobile experience formatted in a way that generates user activity?
- Phone calls
- Chat conversations
- Contact requests
- Are you tracking events in Google Analytics?
Step 3: Building a Strong SEO Foundation
- How is your website’s load time?
- Did you know that half of your website visitors will abandon their session if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load?
- How is your website’s user experience?
- Is your website content engaging?
- Is your website converting visitors into customers?
Step 4: Ensure Your Local SEO is Spotless
- Reviews are one of the most important things you can do- social proof drives purchases!
- Most customers don’t trust advertising but 9 out of 10 young consumers (18-34 year olds) trust online reviews
- More reviews = more revenue
Step 5: EAT – Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness
- What is Google’s product? Trust!
- Google does its best to reward websites with high quality content
- Provide a quality experience for your visitors and Google will reward you!
Your Next Step as a Business Owner: In House vs. Hiring an SEO Expert
At first an SEO expert can seem expensive. But ask yourself, what is it costing you NOT being seeing on the first page of Google while your competitors are?
If you are not able to hire someone to do your SEO right now, these are the top 4 things you can do on your own to improve your SEO…
- Optimize your Google My Business listing- check out one of our webinar recordings on this very topic!
- Get more Google Reviews, especially if you don’t have any recent reviews
- Update the backend of your business website (think headlines, titles, descriptions, alt titles for pictures)
- Increase your website speed
Thank you Matt for sharing your SEO wisdom with us! And be sure to check out Uptick Marketing. For more helpful marketing resources (and much more) see Forge’s Resource Page filled with webinar recordings, podcast episodes, blog posts and much more! If you’re tired of working from home, come take a tour of Forge and receive a free Day Pass to work from our space.