Are People Finding You?

SEO, or search engine optimization,

is one of the most important things you’ll do to get your company, product, service—your brand—known.

SEO affects the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic (unpaid) search results. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing have these results, and they show and rank results based on what each search engine considers most relevant to its users. Hiring someone to do SEO is expensive—I’m not gonna’ lie. SEO is time consuming, and time is money. But your time is worth much more.

SEO is also done wrong by a whole lot of people out there, and that can be worse than spending a lot of money and getting nothing: it can actually get you banned by the search engines. So if you don’t know enough about SEO, how will you know if who you’re hiring is doing white hat (or ethical) SEO? White hat SEO uses strategies such as keywords; backlinking; link building; and writing good, quality content for your website. It also integrates social media – the social media that is right for your specific business.

There are many types of media to get content out there (such as blogging) could be an entire article itself. In other words, white hat SEO is an entire strategy and not just a couple of quick fixes. It is a long-term investment and should be an ongoing, put-it-in-your-monthlybudget type of investment. When we take on an SEO client, there is a 6-month mandatory period involved, and the majority of that time is set up. Once our clients see the improvement in rankings, they stay on. Or, if they decide they’re ranking well enough, they stop the service and then return when their rankings start to fall.  Wait long enough, and we have to start over, basically.

This is the type of time investment in your business that you really should not be doing yourself as the business owner because you should be doing other things to grow your business. You will play a part of ongoing SEO by keeping your SEO team updated on new items, happenings in the business, and so forth. You should definitely shop around, but by now you’re probably wondering “What do I ask?” and “How do I know what to look for?” Here are a few things to make sure to avoid:

1. Reciprocal linking and link exchanges. Don’t confuse what I said above about link building. Link building is good, but it takes time and effort. Think of a link as an endorsement; use it when it makes the most sense and helps the visitor by pointing them to additional resources or related material from your content. If you start throwing in links or buying links, the search engines will see right through that and how do you think they’ll look at those cheap, useless links? Have you ever received an email from someone asking them to trade links and their links have absolutely nothing to do with your business or content? Don’t do it!

2. Duplicate content. Don’t duplicate content on multiple pages. The purpose of content duplication is to try to collect page views, but that’s also a good way to get your site banned or, at the very least, severely penalized by the search engines.

3. Press releases for no news. Press releases can be great if you have something newsworthy to talk about. But I’ve heard people say that they want to put out two press releases a month. When I ask them if they’re going to have newsworthy topics for ALL of those press releases, the answer is always no. Press releases are good if you have news but bad if you don’t.

4. Thin content. This goes along with the press release idea. Great content can drive links, which is what you want, but if your content contains a bunch of keywords just to have the keywords in there but they don’t make sense, you’ll get nowhere. When you’re writing, write to build an audience. Of course you should include keywords in your content, but don’t overdo it; write content to interest people in what you’re doing and who you are. If you hate writing or you’ve hit a wall, hire someone to write for you. A fresh perspective can do wonders.

5. Ignoring website design. Yes, we do websites, and yes, we integrate SEO into the website. But not every web designer does integrate SEO into your website. Sure, their design may be great, but a beautiful site isn’t going to help you if it’s not being found. And while it’s important that you guide your designer, don’t do the designing yourself. I recently had a client direct me to a successful competitor’s website and ask me to update his site to be like the competitor’s. The competitor’s website was 4 years old and looked it. If your competitors are successful, I guarantee it’s not because of their outdated websites. I’m sure they’re running successful SEO campaigns along with providing a great product or service.

Our SEO packages list in detail everything we’ll be doing for you. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request to make of your proposed SEO provider.

The most important thing to remember with any business is this: While SEO can lead a horse to water, only you can make it drink.

Nickey Hollenbach

www.ptconciergeservice.com

info@ptconciergeservice.com