Successful Owners Know: SEO is Still Your Best Business Asset
With all the never-ending challenges pressing you as a small business owner (taxes, high interest rates, inflation, regulations, wage demands, customer stress, reputation, customer acquisition, and trade tariffs), you might find it tough to get bold, adventurous and focused about your marketing.
Yet marketing is your business. To remain successful, you must persist to catch customer’s attention, make an impact, get them to believe in your brand and value proposition, and then follow through on their intent. Otherwise, new leads and loyal customers fade away.
Google search is huge. It’s a key business channel for small businesses from travel to software to real estate. And SEO for Google generates the lion’s share of traffic and has the lowest cost per acquisition of all channels. But there’s something more important to know.
The Battle of the Owners/CEOs
Let’s not avoid the truth, that your business is also you — the CEO/owner. Customers/clients are highly impacted for the good by the vibes and messages you send. The biggest strength in your company is you.
While it satisfies your marketing team’s needs, let’s summarize what it does for you personally as the key person in your business:
- Eases your concerns about the visibility of your company, and vs competitors.
- Feeds all areas of operations to keep your staff vibrant and active.
- Builds and helps you leverage the value of your reputation and expertise.
- Informs and improves your decision-making (more, meaningful data).
- Feeds predictive analytics which you can use to put your company where your customer will be next.
The fact is, that you as the owner/CEO and your key staff’s credibility/experience are essential parts of the value proposition prospects/customers want. Customers want to believe in you, and the more access they have to content that proves your authority, integrity, wisdom, good vibes, and insight, the better. And all too often, elite customers don’t buy your products and services — they’re buying you and your promise of satisfaction.
And SEO can serve you very well in this regard by ensuring your name, messages, and credibility are well-established online. It’s the icing on the cake!
Do You Want or Need the Best at SEO Strategy?
Professional grade search engine optimization (not the cheesy, technical gimmickry from Indian companies executed robotically) has the added power to support the rest of your lead generation and brand building efforts. It’s a foundational support for your entire business – because everyone uses Google to learn, form opinions and justify their actions. You want the confidence that you’ve got the best working for you.
Millions of SMB owners know about Google and SEO and some companies in their industry or segment are thriving. They took the exciting journey into SEO and discovered it inspires the optimization of all digital marketing channels. For instance, great SEO exposure lifts your staff’s spirits, inspires creative content, supports your PPC ads, and feeds contacts into your email nurturing campaigns.
The diversity of content produced for SEO also means your brand messaging is richer and gets reinforced many times over from different lenses, angles, and circumstances. Each of your customer types get to experience your brand the way they like (e.g., your travel agency serves solo Gen Z travelers, millennial families, Seniors, and groups).
From a big picture viewpoint, you’re capturing a bigger audience, better audiences, with better customer insights, to feed your “critical mass” buildup that underpins great sales success ahead.
So What Holds Everyone Back?
Most SMB owners suffer feelings of low confidence, frustration, and failure about not using it, from not putting forth a sincere effort to make it productive. The right attitude is everything. Because success spawns from a healthy, positive attitude that says, “we’re leaders, not distant followers and we’re going to excel at this until we’re the dominant presence on Google.”
If you have this commitment, you will do it. It’s this matter of calm, confident commitment which spawns the necessary skills, creative talent and resources to excel at SEO, and let it drive the success of all other areas of your business.
Through reviews of many websites particularly in the travel industry who have good content (blogs, stories, customer reviews, videos), I found they received very low traffic to their websites, i.e., from Google. What a shame that no one enjoys their content. It fulfills no purpose. It was a waste. Those with massive traffic almost always have a large portion of it from Google search. It’s not a coincidence.
Visibility puts you in the industry narrative as a key, respected and oft-cited firm. Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of things, you become a star.
Successful Companies: Strong on some form of Promotion
Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter have reduced your company’s visibility, algorithmically. What was free before, is not anymore. This means more skill is needed in PR, advertising and promotional activities. We’ll talk about that more below.
What’s Exciting About Professional Level SEO?
Professional level SEO is much more strategic first of all, thus it can dominate Google’s results. It resonates with Google’s complex screening of content to appear to be the best resource for searchers. This optimization of the wording, topics, themes, narrative, and credibility is combined with linking that proves what is said in the content.
Creative craftsmanship and applied strategy in SEO presents an irrefutable statement of ultimate value and trustworthiness.
Advanced SEO is not hype, because Google sees that as spam. Instead, it generates active, positive vibes about you, your company and your UVP. It can be as assertive as you choose.
True Value in SEO for Small Businesses
For travel agencies, tour companies, software companies, real estate brokerages, manufacturers, it brings 3 points of value:
- Cost-Effective Marketing: Just like expensive paid advertising, SEO requires continuous investment and commitment. Once your SEO project creates ranking power and a reputation for great content, it ranks higher for the very best, lead-generating keyword phrases, and for a wider range of related phrases, to build wide brand recognition and visitors at much less ongoing costs.
- Increased Brand Credibility and Trust: Websites that rank higher on search engines are often perceived as more credible, trustworthy and prestigious by users. Being the first company they see in their search responds to something immediate in emotions, and tends to put other competition in the background.
- Well Targeted Leads: Visitors arriving via relevant content pieces or through search keyword phrases on Google means these visitors can deliver some sort of value to your company as brand fans and ambassadors or purchase influencers, or real, high intent customers themselves.
Consider too, that SEO is a form of Presuasion, that readies them to experience your core content which you’ve carefully crafted to present your products and services well. They’re not hitting your product pages cold via an ad. Instead, SEO often sends them to content relevant to the keywords they typed in. Their content journey is more pleasant, less jarring with fewer gaps.
Let’s Focus on the Critical Role of Promotion in SEO Performance
Active, enthusiastic promotion speaks loudly of your confidence in, and desire to put your product out there and ask people to buy it. The real message: the act of promotion suggests you believe in what you’re offering.
And as CEO/Owner, clients are keenly interested in how you personally support your offer. That’s why PR is effective. PR releases often quote the CEO/Owner or key influencer confirming essential features and benefits. SEO can help ensure your voice is always resonating with your web content (and social content too).
Google’s algorithm is affected by promotional activity. Big companies spend millions on ad campaigns and out of that effort, many readers parrot their promotional messages, ideas and content, which then creates backlinks. Yes, paid marketing and promotion may lead to improvements in SEO performance (if they’re done correctly). Some companies don’t benefit from advertising campaigns this way, because the presentation, value proposition, and offer isn’t packaged as a shareable asset. SEO makes it sexy and visible.
Many of my blog posts for instance fulfill numerous objectives, but always in a vibrant, compelling and urgent fashion. They’re crafted as an interesting story, like a journey to paradise. Shouldn’t all content be like that?
If we design your promotions to be shareable (e.g., pdfs, Instagram videos, YouTube videos, graphics, charts, photos, illustrations, quotes, etc.) then it’s more likely you’ll get lasting value in brand citations, backlinks and social media shares. Your graphic designer will be highly involved in this because appearances do matter.
Promotion via advertising and sponsorships also reaches high quality audiences, who may be hard to reach any other way.
Integrating Promotion into Your SEO Strategy
To achieve the best results, promotion should be an integral part of your SEO strategy. Here are some actionable steps to integrate promotion into your efforts:
- Develop a Content Promotion Plan: Each piece of content has a purpose. For every piece of content you create, outline a promotion strategy/tactic for it. Identify target audiences, platforms, topics, content types, and promotion tactics to maximize reach and impact.
- Leverage your Social Media Channels: Share your content on social media platforms where your audience is active. Use hashtags, direct messages, engage with followers, and collaborate with influencers to amplify your reach.
- Build Relationships: Network with industry influencers, bloggers, and journalists. Promote your CEO/VC’s/Owners which creates a real human connection to the key people who make the decisions. Linkedin profile pages and posts are rankable assets. Google wants dynamic and credible content and Linkedin has trust value. Building relationships can lead to guest posting opportunities, backlinks, and increased visibility. Those who are active on social media or who publish content are important contacts to develop. Travel to industry events to meet them and promote their messages and content too. Build friendships and show support.
- Invest in Paid Promotion: Use paid advertising, such as Google Ads or social media ads, to boost your blog posts and the visibility of other impactful content and drive traffic to your site.
- Monitor and Adjust: Track the performance of your promotional efforts using analytics tools. Identify what’s working, when it worked, and the messaging that’s making impact, and adjust your promotion strategy accordingly.
SEO Magnifies Value and Makes it Accessible
Think about the value of professional quality search engine optimization in terms of strengthening your key messages and your credibility/trustworthiness as the key person.
The final point I want to make is that advanced SEO is powerful if it is funded properly and given the time needed to build assets, activate the strategy, and power it up via paid promotions. Sort of like starting a campfire on a cold night. It soon becomes the center of well-being, warmth, customer conversations, and memories.
It might be said that you’re selling good vibes, not a product/service. With Good Vibes as our starting point, we’re launching into this very well.
Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 to discuss your traffic and lead generation needs.
