Ranking in searches is no easy feat and takes many different elements to achieve a top ranking. Remember, your competition is spending big bucks to make sure they’re on top. If you want your search engine marketing to be successful for your small business, it’ll take more than just writing a few blogs on your website to get there.
When it comes to creating your SEO marketing campaign, there are a few things you should take into consideration before putting everything into action.
These pointers will guide you in the right direction for creating and monitoring your search engine marketing plan.
Have Clarity
Make sure to think clearly about what the expectations are and what parts of the budget go where. Realize that with SEO marketing, you need to be in it for the long haul as results don’t happen overnight. When there is a clear plan set in stone that your team can commit to, your plan will be a success.
Measure
SEO can sometimes feel like a “set it and forget it”, but that’s far from the truth. As with most marketing, search engine marketing delivers a constant stream of data that needs to be measured, analyzed, and acted upon. When formulating a campaign, be sure to make a list of everything that needs to be measured and stick to it throughout the whole campaign.
Don’t Trust Your Gut
You’re probably used to hearing the opposite but when it comes to SEO marketing, you have to trust the data. Your gut may be telling you to keep your keywords, but if the data says the current ones aren’t generating clicks, it’s best to change things up. The data will tell you whether a change was successful or not. The data can also tell you about your client’s persona.
The Customer is Always Right
You’ve definitely heard this one. For this type of marketing, it’s 100% true. Your customers have a certain way of thinking and it’s very different from yours as a marketer. You can’t go into their heads and pull out the exact words they’d use to search for your business, so you need to use tools like Google Keyword to see what keywords your customers are using.
You should also make sure that your customer is in the center of your bullseye. Create a strategy that identifies your customer’s needs and makes them your target audience.
Be Competitive
Take a good hard look at your competition and see what they’re doing that makes them successful. Then, turn around and do it better. This may sound hard, especially if your competition is leagues above you, but there are plenty of ranking tools that let you look directly into the back end of competitor’s sites and see how they came to rank above you for the same keyword.
Content is King
Writing blogs isn’t everything in SEO, but it’s a major part of it. If you don’t have content on your site that’s shareable, there’s no way a link to your site will get around naturally. Worse of all, if your content isn’t searchable, it ends up being a waste of your time. That’s why the blogs you write have to align with the keywords you use.
When you start to write content, focus on dividing it 80/20. Ensure that 80% of the blog is geared towards being informational on products or services you actually provide while 20% talks about your brand. For every 8 informational blogs, there should be 2 that express some sort of news or story about your brand.
Be Cost Effective
SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. The way to make a cost effective plan without sacrificing high volume results is by finding long-tail keywords that have a high monthly search volume and a low cost per click. If you’re a small business with a small budget, this will put you on an equal playing field with your competitors who are using high cost keywords.
