A lot of our conversations with prospective clients start like this:
Client: I need to grow my business and I think search engine optimization is the best way to do that. Can you help me out?
Us: Sure! We’ve helped countless businesses grow with SEO. What are your goals?
Client: I just want more sales by the end of the year. You guys can do that, right?
Us: Maybe!
Like we mentioned in our What is SEO article, optimizing a website involves many different on-page and off-page factors. This makes things a little more complicated, so it’s important to have a plan.
Developing and SEO Strategy
When creating an SEO strategy, it’s important to start with a goal. In the hypothetical above, the client mentioned they want to use SEO to grow sales by the end of the year. Maybe to them that means increasing sales by 150% year over year.
Your SEO strategy should always come back to your business goal, so keep that in mind when talking to any digital agency. Remember – if your website’s goal is lead generation, a lead does not always translate to a sale. So, it helps to assign a value to each lead so you can better quantify you SEO efforts.
Your SEO partner should then look at your current web presence, your competitors’ and the keywords you need to rank for to reach your goal.
Some clients come to us with an outdated website looking to rank for very competitive keywords. In this case, the expectations might have to be lowered in the first year because there is a lot of work to be done.
Other clients come to us only needing a few tweaks or strategic pieces of niche content to rank well for their targeted keywords.
Basically – every SEO strategy is different, and there’s no one-size-fits all silver bullet. But that’s ok. Search engine optimization is proven to work for businesses in all industries time and time again. It’s only a matter of time if the right strategy is in place.
Its’ also important to be wary of agencies that advertise quick fixes to land you on page-one search overnight (yep, even WE get those emails). If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The tactics used by these types of companies are often sketchy and can hurt your web rankings in the long run.
Analyzing SEO Results
We all want to see things work right away. When we plug in a new TV we expect it to work. And most of the time it does, but it’s super frustrating when it doesn’t. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t work like a new TV.
SEO may not feel like it’s working right away. But we like to tell our clients to keep an eye on organic traffic (web traffic that comes from search engines) after we start implementing their strategy. Organic traffic growth is a good indicator that efforts are working even if leads or sales stay stagnate at first.
As tough as it may be for the first few months, or even the first year, you’ll be rewarded in the end if you stay the course and work together with your digital partner to carry out your search engine optimization plan.
Want to work with us to develop and implement an SEO strategy? Contact us to get started!
