Any business owner who operates a website knows the importance of SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the method through which web site operators increase their site’s search engine ranking. Without it no matter how impressive your website, it’s as valuable as a billboard on a lonely desert highway.  However, with the right SEO you can drive a plethora of qualified prospects to your website and let your site do the selling.
SEO includes many important steps, and has around 200 different indicators.  Due to the lack of standardization it is not uncommon for a SEO company to only use 1 of the primary factors.  A few of the biggest are:
– Learning the keywords that your client base is using when searching for businesses just like yours.
– Tweaking your website content so that it includes those keywords that are most popular and most widely used. Especially in the titles, title tags, headlines, and hyperlinks.
– Developing links from other highly regarded websites (that link to pages within your website). These could be industry directories, other websites in your industry, classified adds, image sharing, social media posts and shares, article directories and more.
For instance, if you operate a hair salon in Grand Rapids, Michigan, you may learn that customers are searching the Internet using keywords such as “hair stylist Grand Rapids” in order to find a business like yours. Including those keywords on your salon’s website will cause your website to appear at the top of their search engine results. They will visit your site, review your service offerings, and – hopefully – schedule an appointment at your salon.
The recent concern is that social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are actually replacing SEO in terms of generating website traffic. This concern is well founded, given the growing popularity of social media. More and more customers are seeking referrals from friends and family through social media connections. As such, it is important that both large and small businesses maintain an active presence on social media. Optimizing your social media profiles is an excellent way to engage your customers directly, but rest assured that it does not replace SEO marketing.
When looking for a new product or service many people go to a social media platform to ask for referrals and then “Google it” immediately afterwards to see what they can find on their own or vice versa. The reason, it’s all incredibly easy to do and looking up information online via Google or other search engines is virtually instantaneous. This allows us to start our research while we wait to see if anyone offers a referral for us to consider in addition to the potential companies that we found online. Search engines also offer a more complete look at potential companies and products vs. just ones that are commonly known by your friends. This makes the search engines and social media excellent complimentary partners in finding new companies, products and services.
Despite the fact that your customers may learn of your business on Facebook or Twitter, you can rest assured that they are still going to visit your website before purchasing your products and services. The reason is simple. Even though your company likely maintains an informative and active social media profile, social media is limited. There is no way to list your products and services, prices, FAQ, and customer testimonials on a social media profile. As such, your customers are going to head over to Google and search for your website, along with those of your competitors. Therefore, creating an SEO optimized webpage that displays at the top of the Google results page when your customer searches for “hair styles Grand Rapids” is still an important part of driving traffic to your website.
For most industries in order to create a strong online presence, it is important to be active in social media and participate in SEO marketing. Working with an SEO company who will help you perform keyword research and optimize your website content, create fresh optimized content and build backlinks to your website is the best way to increase your customer base and, therefore, your profits.
If you are interested in SEO services for your website you can request a quote from Brassy Marketing, a Michigan SEO company located in Grand Rapids and Traverse City, MI.