Search engine optimization gets thrown around a lot nowadays. For many technical service business owners, SEO may mean it is a technical term for marketers or it’s an enigma that can be solved for enough time and manpower.
SEO means that you've optimized your entire website's content so that the Google algorithm can index the pages and show your website’s content in search results. You use keywords and long tail keywords to describe the service or product you sell. Or better yet, tell what problem you solve for customers. And you would do that all on your website.
Google will match the information on the website and the search of your potential clients and show your website, preferably on page one of search results. Now it gets more complicated with the age of the website, the website load times and the backend data, but will not go into the weeds for this introductory article.
Why is SEO important?
You want to be in the awareness and consideration stage of the client buying process. Potential clients realize they have a problem and are searching online for solutions. That's why it's important for your contact content to show up during a Google search. Google accounts for roughly 95% of searches made online.
You need to have the right keywords, the phrases your customers use to find you, not necessarily what you brainstorm in the boardroom. You need to have those phrases on your website to describe your products and services. That's successful SEO.
So if you're not in and devoting enough resources to SEO, how can you profess potential clients? Find you? How can you help Google show your website on page one a search? It's impossible without SEO.
That's how SEO is a key part of sales. So more than 70% of B2B buyers fully defined their needs before engaging with a sales representative according to CSO insights. That means the content you serve on your website is catching potential clients at the awareness and consideration stages. Here are the places in your website to implement keywords and long tail phrases:
- Content
- Blogs
- Web pages
- Landing pages
- URLs
- Headings
- Image descriptions
- Metadata
- Page titles
SEO Is Still Relevant
So SEO is relevant. Forbes note that SEO still works well and has not fallen off the bandwagon. In the early days of search when search algorithms were just starting to appear, marketing agencies would use keyword stuffing or other black hat practices to get their websites ranking higher. Now it's about having a good client buying process and a smooth user experience all the way through your website.
How to Find Keywords
Start with keyword research to get your website and content to show up in Google search. First, you can go to your internal team and list the words and phrases you would use to describe your product and services.
We can help you talk to your clients and ask them what they would type into Google if they were searching for a service like yours. You might be surprised at what your clients say. You might not agree with here what your customers are saying, but that is how they would describe your products and services. It may be simplified.
However, it's important to meet your clients where they are, not where you want them to be.
Keep that in mind when you're doing keyword research is that it's important to have client input as well. You can use keyword research tools like Moz or Google Adwords Planner, to find search terms volume and competition. Choose keywords that have good volume and fairly low to medium competition, so we can start ranking.
Create Stellar Content
Now the best way for SEO to work is to create stellar content. Keywords are nothing without great content. Content is more than just a bunch of keywords. Content works increase sales by serving the right content at the right time to perspective clients searching online. They'll come across blogs, social media posts, and product pages designed to answer their questions and provide information to solve their problem.
So what do we mean by quality content? It's just information helpful to your potential client. That's quality content when you have the best, most engaging and most importantly, relevant content that potential clients will find your business before others. This will give you an opportunity to build relationships and turn potential clients into new clients. Here are the types of content we can help with:
- Blogs
- Video
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Animations
- User generated content
- Guest posting
- Case studies
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- How-to-guides
- Listicles or lists
- Business reviews
- Client testimonials
Content is at the heart of inbound marketing. Remember to optimize your content of relevant keywords and make sure those keywords are congruent to the content type that you're using.
Have Great Online Reviews
Another place where great SEO is to have great online reviews. Search engines are not just tools to answer your questions or solve your problems. You can look at Google My Business and you'll also find other info on your business.
You want to have good online reviews for your business. Online reviews are vital for companies because most clients will read reviews on a business before the signing the contract. To help you with that, we can get customers to post positive online reviews. We also have a review funnel that we can help you implement it. Great customers post positive online reviews will help your business and it will give potential clients reason to spend money with you.
What is the ROI on SEO?
So SEO is quite cost effective that technical service companies can use to gain exposure and produce results. The ROI is quite high compared to PPC or pay-per-click campaigns. An article from New Media Campaigns showed that organic or SEO results are 8.5 times more likely to be clicked on than page search results.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that SEO impacts your sales. If your potential clients can't find you, they can't buy from you. Many purchases and business decisions start with a search on Google. Show up as early as you can in the client buying process.
