How Can SEO Help Grow My Business? 3 Ways Of Getting Found.

When someone searches for a specific topic or keywords related to your business, ideally, you'd like your website to appear among the top results.  And by top, I mean page 1, since 99% of Google searchers never click on something from the second page.  As the old marketing joke goes, "The best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google because no one will ever look there".  Yes, we marketers have a strange sense of humor!

As if SEO wasn't confusing enough, there are actually 3 types:

1.  On-page SEO:  This involves optimizing your web pages for keywords to match searches.  This is a balancing act of not going after keywords that are incredibly competitive and will take a crazy amount of content to capture and finding those niche, long tail (multiple words) keywords that will also convert.  For example, capturing the term "attorney" is quite competitive and is also being bid on in ad campaigns run by deep-pocketed big law firms.  However, the term "business startup attorney" is more likely to be captured through a content campaign.  Adding multiple, ideally longer, blogs on your website on various topics using this keyword and similar keywords on a regular basis will help that page rank higher, provided that you are also doing off-page SEO.

2.  Off-page SEO (i.e. backlinks):  Google is a popularity contest.  The more people visit a website and link to that website as a reference, the more Google will show that website in search results.  So if a more popular website links to yours as a reference, provided the link is within relevant content, that's a signal to Google to consider your website as more authoritative and worthy of a higher rank.  Building quality backlinks is an important part of your SEO strategy.  Many popular websites will charge, but it never hurts to provide your original, nicely written content to them to replace something missing or broken on their website, and you might get lucky!

3.  Local SEO:  Local search is all about showing up in the 3-pack of Google Maps on search.  This type of ranking is of your Google Business Profile listing and not directly of your website, although local optimization of your website also plays a role in your map ranking.  The key here is to fully complete your listing, including your services, and get a bunch of backlinks (citations) and as many 5-star reviews as possible!

Most buyer journeys begin with search, so making sure your business shows up is an important component of your top-of-funnel marketing strategy.