What are the top 5 benefits of SEO?

When I say that it’s the best practice, I mean it. It’s the best way to increase your search traffic while advertising your business.

Here are the best benefits of SEO. Let’s get into it!

1. SEO = Increased Rankings

Search engine optimization helps your site rank higher in search results. This is an obvious one but it’s the most important. Your site’s rankings, if you measure it, will correlate with the traffic that you get from search engines. Higher rankings, more traffic, and more conversions = greater revenue.

So it’s key to remember that SEO is not just about rankings or getting more traffic to your website. In the end, it’s about ROI. How much more actual profit can you create through SEO?

Every industry is going to be different, but from what we’ve seen, having top-ranking positions in Google can make or break a business.

2. SEO = Relationships

SEO is a way to build relationships. Your business will be more successful if you invest in creating a strong impact on your audience when they’ve come to your website. Offer your website visits and prospects a fluid website experience and great content that answers real questions they may have or that can direct them to the solutions they need.

The problem, the thing that most people talk about with SEO is not the impact on rankings, it’s the impact on sales. People forget to tell you that what matters is how you can nurture your existing relationships. SEO is a way to build relationships.

Businesses that focus only on getting new business are headed toward disaster. As long as you do good work, your most profitable prospects are those who have already done business with you. So remember to focus on how you can nurture your existing relationships.

This will help leverage your SEO strategies over the longterm.

3. SEO = Commitment

SEO is a commitment. To do SEO properly, you must have a product/service that people want. What are the benefits of your product and service? Make sure these are clearly communicated on your website.

Simplify your message and make it clear exactly what you offer. Put on some slick graphics and audio assets to create a genuinely helpful visitor experience.

In return, you’ll get legitimate, trustworthy traffic.

4. SEO = Visibility

SEO increases visibility in search. SEO will help you get more organic traffic to your website and can be a low-cost method that can generate leads for your business.

5. SEO = ROI

SEO has the highest ROI of any marketing or advertising avenue available to businesses today. Now, that number may be different for different industries and situations, however, for most local businesses good search engine rankings would have the biggest impact on their business than any other avenue.

The ROI you get from SEO can be remarkable.

You have to think of SEO more like real estate and less like TV commercials.

Think about the last TV commercial you saw. Do you remember it? Probably not. Now, think about where you were at the last TV commercial you saw.

The last TV commercial I saw was while I was watching something with my wife last night. I was relaxing and have no idea what the commercial was about. It didn’t matter either. I wasn’t going to call a business at 10 pm while I was relaxing.

Now, I want you to think about the last service or product that you needed to buy. What was it and where were you?

For me it was yesterday. My wife asked me to pick up some dinner. So I picked up my phone and I searched for sushi and I went to the sushi restaurant that is closest to my house.

The latter is how SEO works for your business. Instead of interrupting your prospects with ads that they are 97% not interested in, you’re positioning your business in a place that makes it easy for your prospects to find when they’re looking for what you’re offering.

So instead of trying to “convince” them to buy whatever your selling. You’re simply located in a place, like the sushi restaurant, that is close and now has become the most convenient choice.

All because your business was the first that they saw in Google when they were searching for your products and services.

Close It Out

So if you’re looking to transform your business. Then SEO is the way to go and hopefully a few of these tips will help you out along the way!

A Guide On How To Perform An SEO Site Audit

The world of SEO is always changing and this means that specific strategies no longer work and there are always new ones. As a result, it is extremely important that you do an SEO audit on all of your sites, on a regular basis. This will ensure that they are properly optimized for the current search engine landscape.

Also, by regularly auditing your sites, you will ensure they remain healthy and keep on getting organic traffic.

So, with that said, we’ll now get started on how to do a site audit.

The first thing you should do is a site crawl and it should take a couple of minutes for the crawl to finish. There are many tools that you can use for this such as Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, etc.

These crawlers will crawl through your entire site and find problems such as page title issues, bad keywords, broken links, duplicate content, images that haven’t been compressed, bad redirects and much more. Once you have identified all of the issues, then you can start working on them.

After they’ve all been fixed, you can do the crawl again to make sure there aren’t any other issues you may have missed.

Next, you will need to check your on-page SEO.

You should look at all the pages and posts on your site and check all of the URLs, page titles and headers. This is done to check for any duplications which may cause keyword cannibalization.

If you notice that you have more than one page dedicated to a specific topic or keyword, then you should combine the information into one page and delete the other one.

Of course, you should delete the one that is not ranking or is ranking lower. Also, make sure you remember to put a 301 redirect in place so that anyone visiting the old URL will get automatically forwarded to the new one.

Additionally, you should take some time to go through your entire keyword blueprint and ensure that your pages are ranking for their correct keywords. You should also check to see if there are any keywords that you’re ranking for that you didn’t specify in your keyword blueprint. This can be easily done on Ahrefs or Semrush where you simply enter the page URL and look for the organic keywords it is ranking for. You may find lots of long-tail keywords that you’re on the second or third page for that you didn’t optimize the page for. As a result, you can easily improve your rankings by including those keywords on your page and building a few links with those keyword specific anchors. This will help you to get more organic traffic with relatively little work.

Another important aspect of any SEO audit is checking the speed of the site and its overall uptime. There are many site monitoring tools you can use for this.

In particular, when looking at site speed, you should strive to speed up the site as much as possible. This is necessary since site speed is a Google ranking factor and the faster your site is, the higher Google will rank it. Also, website users are much smarter than they were before and if your site is slow, they will simply go back and click on another website. This will lead to lower traffic numbers, conversion rates, and sales.

Next, you will need to do an audit on your backlinks. This is extremely important since you will not only get the backlinks that you build yourself but ones that were gained organically.

Also, you will probably get a lot of spam or even malicious backlinks and you need to identify these and disavow them. These can easily be identified if they are on “bad” sites, foreign language sites or where you see over-optimized anchor texts done through a negative SEO link building campaign.

Once you have disavowed the bad backlinks, you should look carefully at the ratio of your own backlinks. If there are too many target anchors or too many strong sites, you should aim to create more pillow links to ensure your backlink profile remains healthy and natural looking.

To wrap things up, we have just covered how you can perform an SEO site audit. It is best to schedule a site audit at least once every 3 months so that you can continuously maintain the health of your site and ensure that you remain in Google’s good graces.

What Do Google Analytics, Search Console, and Google My Business Do?

Knowing how to leverage Google’s many tools can be a game-changer for your business. It is important to understand exactly what each tool does, how to use them and to understand how they are different.

Below, we will be going over some of the key things that you are going to want to know about each of Google’s marketing platform tools.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool that every website owner should be integrating into their website. It is a tool that will allow you to see everything that is important about your website’s traffic.

You are not only going to be able to see who is visiting your website, but where they are from, where the traffic originated from, and more. Having all of this information readily available at your disposal is crucial to your business and it’s chances of success.

For a local business, it is going to be important to not only figure out if you are reaching your local market but where they are being sent from. This is going to give you a good idea of whether or not you can make any improvements to your efforts.

Whereas, if you are selling something specific online, you might be interested to see which sources are bringing you the most traffic and what demographic is most interested in what you are offering.

What Can You Do With Google Analytics?

1. Devices

One of the things that you will be able to do with this tool is to see what kinds of devices the users are accessing your website with. This is very important to understand because it will give you a good idea of how they experienced your website.

If your website is not properly optimized for mobile devices, it is a good idea to know whether or not the majority of your traffic is stemming from mobile devices.

After all, you want to provide your traffic with the best possible experience.

2. Where Visitors Are Based

Another key thing that you will be able to find out about your traffic is where they are based. You will be able to see exactly where the people are accessing your website from whether it be your local area or somewhere thousands of miles away.

Being able to see this information is going to be crucial for a lot of businesses to optimize their advertising, marketing, and even business efforts as a whole.

3. Pages

Another thing that you will be able to gain from looking at the analytics of your website would be the pages that the users are accessing the most and how long they are spending on it.

Being able to tell this data is going to be key to optimizing your website as well as possible for conversions.

If users are spending a significant amount of time on a specific page of your website, it might indicate that it is too cluttered or that it is not optimized to convert well.

What Is Search Console?

Google’s Search Console is a tool that allows you to have much greater control over the way that your website actually appears in the search engines. With this console, you will be able to optimize your website to rank better.

What Can You Do With Google’s Search Console?

1. Sitemap

One of the things that you can do to improve your website’s ranking with the search console is to upload an accurate sitemap of your website to Google. This alone is going to help Google index your website so that it even knows that it exists. Without doing this, Google might not even know that your website exists.

2. Block

Another thing that you will be able to do with the console is to effectively block Google from accessing certain parts of your website. This is good if you are worried about duplicate content or other things that you don’t want Google to crawl.

3. Links

Another thing that you will be able to do is completely change the links that appear under your listing when your website is ranking in the search engine results.

What Is Google My Business?

Google My Business is Google’s answer to local directories. It is an easy way for local businesses to effectively manage their presence across the various Google platforms which includes both search and maps.

Google continues to keep implementing more advertising and marketing features in its Maps application which presents a good opportunity for local businesses. It allows you to display all kinds of information about your business to provide information visitors might want to know including your business name, address, hours of operation, and more.

What Can You Do With Google My Business?

With Google My Business, you will be able to display pertinent information about your business, interact and engage with customers that leave reviews on your listing, and even see insights on how customers searched for your business.

Having a thorough understanding of all of the above can really help you position your business as well as possible within the local market. Using all three of these in conjunction can really help you boost your online and search engine presence in your local market.