I recently got an email from a customer. Let’s call her Customer A. She had been approached by someone who was going to get her tons and tons of business.
We establish your online business presence by Listing and Validating your business listing on three of the largest and most popular online business listing services: Google+ Local, Yahoo! Local and Bing. We live in an internet-centric society. Your customers are no longer looking in bulky phone books or dialing their local operator. Your customers are looking online to fulfill their needs.
A different customer, Customer B, sent me an email last week because he’d received a personal email with a prepared SEO report about his site. The report had specific recommendations to improve the SEO on his site. It looked like it had taken hours to prepare.
Does SEO Magic Exist?
In a word – no.
Customer A already has a website, a mobile website and an active Facebook page. The site is already coming up well in Google for its selected keywords. The business owner has been listed in the local paper several times in the annual “best of” supplement.
In light of those facts, why does the SEO offer sound so out of touch with my customer’s situation? Many of these SEO companies send out emails that sound as though they’ve really looked at a company’s site and situation. But the fact is that they send out the same email to everyone.
Customer B was less impressed with his “personalized SEO report” when I showed him that it was a computerized report from WooRank.com. Many SEO companies use computerized tools that are available to website owners like WooRank or Moz.com.
The emails received by my customers made it seem like there was some sort of SEO magic. The fact is that SEO takes time, work and energy. While it shouldn’t be ignored, SEO alone will not make your business successful.
So What Should a Business Owner Do in Terms of SEO?
It depends on your industry and situation. However in most cases a general, basic level of SEO will work just fine. That’s the sort of SEO service that I provide.
My SEO services include:
- Scanning your site for broken links
- Setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
- Doing coding tweaks that help SEO
- Checking out your competitor’s rankings and SEO activities to see if there’s anything that you should emulate
- I also advise businesses to have a mobile-friendly site and to partake in some sort of social media.
Google Analytics and Regular Monitoring Are Key
As a business owner you probably know how many customers you have, monthly average revenue, average expenses and other key indicators. As a website owner it’s important to know some basic information about your website. I’m talking about things like how many visitors your site gets and how people get to your site. Once you’re familiar with the basics then you’ll be amazed at how differently you feel about search engine optimization.
My customers both decided to pass on the SEO “experts”. Customer A is going to focus on getting into the next “best of” section in her local newspaper. Customer B realized that WooRank recommend some of the same things that I’d been telling him for months. Namely that he needed to partake in some form of social media.
While I cannot help you SEO magic, I can help you get a good, solid handle on your SEO. Contact me if you’re interested.
