July 21, 2021
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It’s one of the most overused (and misunderstood) acronyms in digital marketing. It’s also crucial for building brand awareness and visibility.
SEO, or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, is a key aspect of targeting future customers and directing unpaid traffic to your website.
Search engines such as Google (accounting for 90%+ of search engine queries), send out ‘crawlers’ to pull data from the internet. This data is built into an index, which is fed into an algorithm. This algorithm, or rules engine, works to match the data with a user’s query in hierarchical order.
Unlike paid advertising, SEO relies on organic methods of drawing traffic to your website.
Successful SEO means your website will appear highly ranked (i.e., near the top) when a consumer is looking for a product or service matching yours via search engine queries on Google or Bing.
The obvious benefits to improving the quality and quantity of traffic flow include:
Unfortunately, many businesses overlook the most simple, cost-effective, and powerful strategies for improving SEO.
According to Neil Patel, there are two approaches to SEO, one being outdated and ineffective, the other being critical to improving your ROI.
What are the two SEO mindsets?
Taking the form of Google reviews and SEO copywriting, the new SEO approach considers the human aspect of the buyer journey. In other words, it is deeply focused on quality of engagement over metrics alone.
It’s surprisingly easy.
Providing your customers with enriching, shareable content on an easy-to-navigate website builds trust and quality inbound traffic. This creates what is called a ‘natural link profile’, which in turn makes your website ‘search engine friendly’.
When talking about creating engaging content for your customers to improve search engine rankings and ROI, local SEO is a great place to start.
Local SEO is about zeroing in on keywords and content specific to your geographic area and customer base.
Reviews are the number one way to create hype and brand awareness to improve your local SEO. Reviews work to target market groups within a set proximity to each other, leading to genuine connections and understanding between your customers and your brand.
Local SEO helps crawlers to index your content for keyword-specific related searches, meaning your SEO ranking improves dramatically.
For the best outcome, a business will incorporate all (or most), of the strategies we cover below:
Example 1:
Reviews & SEO – GRUBBY HANDS CAFÉ
A new café in Melbourne’s CBD has been struggling to keep up with its competitors, even though new customers claim it’s the best coffee around. The café owners decide to improve SEO with a website-integrated review platform. Staff set up an iPad at the cash register and encourage each happy customer to leave a review and a star rating. As an extra incentive, each customer that uploads a photo of their meal and a Google review receives a free coffee. This gives Google crawlers lots of auto generated content that is both local and stacked with keywords for the café. Within months, they need to hire new staff to cater to the influx of customers.
Example 2:
Blogs & Local SEO – NO SWEAT GYMS
A gym located in Sydney NSW is looking to grow its business and increase its service offering. They haven’t had much success with their website, named ‘Big Sweat Gyms’. Most leads are located 25km+ away, so they change their overarching webpages to ‘Inner West Sydney Big Sweat Gyms’. Then, using local knowledge as inspiration, they post helpful, shareable blogs covering such topics as – ’Best Supplements Stores in Inner West Sydney’ and ‘The 10 Best Parks for Outdoor Fitness in Marrickville, Newtown & Erskineville, Sydney’. Within a few weeks, they are receiving more local enquiries than ever before. To improve the service offering for new and existing clients, they create a user-friendly app for clients to book classes, rate workouts and provide feedback. This simple inclusion leads to a 65% increase in class attendance within the first month of its rollout.
Example 3:
Long-tail keywords & website optimisation – SWIFT HAIR SALON
A Brisbane hair salon is finding it hard to justify the money spent on paid Google Ads. Most of their leads are from people who aren’t looking for the premium service they offer. To improve their SEO, they add long-tail keywords to Google Ads, such as ‘premium hair salon west end Brisbane’, and ‘best south Brisbane haircut balayage foils models’. Following a website review, they realise the high quality images in their website gallery has increased the website load time to 10-15 seconds, causing a 98% abandonment rate. To address this issue, they compress all the images in the gallery, reducing the website load time to <2 secs. Within six months, their website abandonment rate is <3%, their clientele has doubled, and they receive a Best Local Hairdresser award nomination.
Improving your SEO doesn’t have to be hard, time consuming, or expensive. Nail these following points to dramatically improve your ROI:
If you’re unfamiliar with SEO and serious about improving your search engine ranking and speeding up sales cycles, get in touch with Genion today!
Australian made and owned, we provide B2B and B2C companies with single point, fully integrated solutions for optimising SEO and creating seamless customer experiences.
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