If you need to compare prices on a new lawn mower what do you do? When you and your friends need a new spot for happy hour where do you go? If your puppy has an accident on your girlfriend’s new white rug, how do you find help?
You go to the internet—and so do millions of people looking for businesses just like yours.
In fact, these days search engines are the number one way that people research products and services.
So, how can you make sure that Google and other search engines are able to find, rank and display your company ahead of your competitors?
IMPROVE YOUR SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is one of those buzzwords that young marketers love to tout and put on their resumes, but few truly understand. It is the process by which organizations make their websites more “crawl-able” by search engine spiders that analyze each website page-by-page to see what it is about.
Good SEO practitioners consider things like written content, site titles, ALT text, meta descriptions, headers, URLs and page descriptions, and then optimize them in a way that computers easily understand. To do so, he or she will need to do research on trending keywords and place them strategically throughout the site in order to ensure that the search engine is able to provide searchers with the most relevant information.
PREPARE TO PAY
Once upon a time, social media and digital advertising was a Wild, Wild West—where anyone with an understanding of computers or viral content production could create messages, blast them out, and watch as the likes rolled in. Those days are long gone.
Now, over a decade since the blogging boom and popularity of sites like MySpace, social media is a thriving, money-making industry all on its own. While it is still possible for brands and people to achieve organic success, companies like Google and Facebook have made it increasingly more difficult for the little guys to get views. Instead, they sell our eyeballs and attention at a price by prioritizing and repositioning the content generated by ad buyers.
So, social media is not the free for all it used to be. Nonetheless, companies can now target and attract very niche audiences for as little as $5 a day via Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and more.
INVEST IN YOUR TECH TEAM
If hiring an expensive programmer sets your heart a flutter, relax. Your company does not need to hire a full-time engineer to compete in today’s digital landscape. Still, we would be remiss if we did not tell you that you will likely need to hire some kind of technical help in order to maximize your SEM results.
Beyond the technical aspects of SEO, which are made easier with sites like WordPress and Plugins like Yoast, your company should have at least one person (internally or externally) who can run regular maintenance on your site, and implement the more technical aspects of marketing like changing out meta data, optimizing the layout of your site, building effective landing pages, surveying your site for broken links, and implementing a robust data collection system.
GET CREATIVE WITH YOUR CONTENT
Ultimately, all search engines live and die by their ability to give searchers what they want. Consider for a moment that Google will likely return exactly what you need if you were to type in something like, “babysitters in NYC.” The more specific your search, the better the results that you will find.
To that end, search engines use “spiders” to crawl each page looking for keywords that will tell them what the page is about. If a hardware store posts a blog about the best seeds to plant for spring, Google’s spiders might index that post for a time when a consumer wants to find “the best seeds for spring.” If the content is a good match, then the store would have a great opportunity to sell that blogger the seeds that he or she is looking for.
More and more, consumers are looking for companies who dedicate their sites to providing them with content that actually answers their questions rather than sells a product. Make sure that you and your team are coming up with creative ways to answer your target audience’s most frequently asked questions.
EMBRACE THE POWER OF THE LINK
Depending on who you ask, backlinking may have a bad rep.
Google and other search engines use the number of pages that link back to yours as a measurement of the quality of your page. Essentially, the more pages that link back to your site, the more search engines will regard your page as a quality resource for searchers.
In the early days, many “link farms” took advantage of this knowledge in the way that many “follower farms” on social media have. In essence, they would sell hundreds of backlinks from content-less pages to companies looking to improve their own ranking. Google and other search engines have since caught on, and now, links from dubious sources can actually hurt the ranking of your page.
So, while it is still important for pages to work on getting linked to, ensure that your marketing team is going after quality links by building relationships with various industry leaders and stakeholders.