How to increase your SEO

Like most articles in this blog, most online marketing companies will hate me for writing some of these things. That’s because a lot of online marketing companies take advantage of the fact client’s don’t know about SEO to do the irreducible minimum when it comes to SEO. When we created Key Marketing Strategies, one of our goals was to do things differently. Just like we need to know all about your company in order to best market it, so we want to be transparent and allow you to know as much as possible about marketing we do, so that you can not only understand what we’re doing, but also participate to help your business grow. In a previous article I explained the basic concept behind this “SEO” that most business owners always hear about. My next series of articles will try and explain some of the key things you can do that help increase your SEO. First things first, KEYWORDS. As millions if not billions of searches get conducted in Google every single day, records are created on what words and phrases get searched for an how often. When trying to improve your SEO, it’s important to know what words within and related to your business, industry, services or products get searched for and how often. In addition, based off these records and how many sites contain those words or phrases, every word or phrase gets scored as to how difficult it is to get show up on Google first page when that word or phrase is typed into Google. Here is an example: Lets say someone searches for “Hot Dog”. You can bet that there are millions of websites that contain the word “Hot Dog”. You can also be sure that “Hot Dog” gets searched for pretty often by people all over the world. No doubt, if you sell hot dogs, you would probably be interested to show up when people search the word “Hot Dog”. But the truth is, to show up on Google first page is probably going to be very difficult due to the amount of searches that contain the words “Hot Dog” and due to the amount of websites online that contain those words and due to other things I’ve explain in another article. At the same time, you’d be wasting your time if you try and show up for a keyword like “Hot Dog” since you don’t necessarily know that everyone typing “Hot Dog” into Google is near you or that they even want a Hot Dog. Maybe someone is trying to find images of a hot dog and so types that in. In SEO, we use “keywords” to determine what you want to be ranking (showing up) for and then we work to get you showing up and increasing your standings in Google for those keywords. By standings we mean, of all the websites that talk about “Hot Dogs” which number are you on the priority list. And, as Google only shows about 10-15 websites on a single page, if you’re anywhere below 20 or 30, the ugly truth is you won’t get seen. The KEY to keywords is to locate keywords that are relevant to your business, service or product, that are actual things that would be typed into Google and that are relatively easy, or at least not impossible, to rank for. So let’s go back to the hot dog idea. Maybe you sell organic hot dogs imported straight from Vienna. We could choose a longer phrase such as “Organic Hot Dogs Imported From Vienna”. By lengthening the phrase a little bit, tailoring the keywords to your business, ensuring those to choose keywords that you can rank for. Not only would that be easier to rank for but you can be pretty sure that anyone searching for such a phrase is most likely looking for what you’ve got. The key is figuring out 5-10 key words and phrases that get a relatively decent search volume and that with some work you can start showing up on Google first page when people search for those keywords in Google. Choosing the right keywords is important because every SEO action you take after will depend on those keywords. So what next? Read the next post on website optimization.