Leveraging SEO for Enhanced Digital Presence and Profitability

Your Customers DEMAND your Presence

It’s 2024, folks. It would be best to have a website and a consistent virtual brand in appearance and messaging across search, social, and other online industry channels.

New data suggests 8/10 purchases (including offline) BEGIN with an online search. And because Google owns over 70% of that market share, that’s where your customers are likely looking for you.

Type in your main keyword in Google….if you don’t show up in the top 3 slots, you are missing out on up to 61% of the search traffic for your brand. YES, THAT IS 61%.

People are lazy. So much so that the first three positions in Google get over 61% of traffic. And if you’re NOT on page #1, you lose 90%+ % of traffic.

This is not only costly in terms of direct revenue loss from potential sales conversions, but you are also losing brand awareness and market share to competitors who now have more sales and revenue and are better positioned than you to push you out of business.

SEO Allows you to Double or triple-down

Content produced for search engine optimization can be multi-purposed across multiple media channels in part or whole.

You can use article snippets to tease blog posts across social media, via email marketing, on forums, or other publications.

Additionally, other readers will proactively share good content with their audiences, expanding your reach further, growing brand/product awareness, building backlinks, and driving direct visitors to your pages.

Over time, this content will rank for long-tail keywords, provide Google with fresh “food” to ingest, indicate to search engines that your site is up-to-date and relevant to readers, and help establish your company as an industry leader or knowledge resource for your niche.

The Ultimate SEO Trust & Credibility Factor

In a world scorned by scammers, con artists, and general scum, establishing trust and credibility is crucial to winning over new customers. This is especially true for those customers who have never heard of you.

Ranking high in the SERPs is a lesser-considered aspect of “trust and credibility.” Still, it is a key factor in influencing a consumer or customer’s decision to visit your site and buy from you.

If you rank high in Google, in a consumer’s mind, you ARE trustworthy simply because Google “says you are” by placing your site above the competition.

We must remember that the public does not understand how SEO works. To them, if Google places your site in the top three organic positions, then you must be the best.

Other often overlooked opportunities to build trust organically include consumer reviews on other websites, ranking your own “PR” content on separate domains, and so on.

For example, if your business URL is www.RedWidgets.com, you might also opt to set up www.RedWidgetsReviewed.com and write a business profile piece on your site, positioning you as a leader in the industry, highlighting any awards or commendations and any positive consumer

reviews you’ve received over the years.

The Hidden Driving Force Behind Offline Sales

From time to time, we hear from the “brick and mortar” folks that their Google rankings don’t matter much because they don’t sell anything online.

On the surface, this would seem to make sense. However, consumer data on purchase behavior tells a different tale. A Nielsen study found that over 86% of consumers use the Internet to find local businesses before driving to and physically purchasing items or services in-store.

If that wasn’t enough to convince you, local searches for products and services, on average, convert at multiples MUCH higher than generic searches. This is primarily due to the urgency factor of many of these searches. For example, if you need a dress locally, you likely don’t want to wait

or don’t have time to wait for shipping, and you need to find and purchase that item for an event, say, this weekend. Or, if you are looking for local plumbers or auto mechanics, you likely need something repaired as soon as possible.

The Hidden Gems

Perhaps you already employ PPC campaigns or other display ads as part of your marketing mix. To begin this process, you likely built up a list of keywords using some third-party tool (or just your noggin).

This list was then used as keywords to place bids on. If a Googler searched for those keywords, your ad would show up. If they clicked on that ad, you paid the CPC cost of that click.

But what you may not be aware of is that CPC/PPC search traffic only accounts for about 15% of the average SEM marketing budget and only about 25% of the traffic.

Search traffic is like an iceberg, with all the primary (most often thought of) and obvious keywords on the surface. Meanwhile, the LONGTAIL combinations that customers use to search for your products lie beneath the surface.

Quality articles of 1000-2000 words in length tend to hit keyword combinations that come about naturally in the process of thought and those that are often absent from your PPC campaigns.

Google also intelligently uses related “concepts” and sub-topics within your article to extrapolate other key search phrases that may not even be present on your pages but are relevant to other “hidden” user searches.

In this way, quality content curated for SEO can uncover keywords and combinations searched for in droves by users of your products/services…. as you know, long-tail keywords are laser-focused, intent-driven, and convert at much higher rates than their more generic counterparts.

As such, ranking for several long-tail keywords generating a cumulative total of 1000 searches a month is often much more valuable than ranking for a generic keyword totaling 5000 searches monthly.

It’s all About User Intent in 2024

In 2020-2024, web search is all about matching Googlers with the intent behind their search. Much of this is accomplished with Rankbrain, a machine learning algorithm placed on top of Google’s core algorithm.

Why is this important? Well, as Google gets better at matching users with EXACTLY what they are looking for, be it an informational or commercial search, conversion rates, and page engagement for organic searches have gone through the roof!

While other forms of marketing and advertising are “intrusive”, interrupting the user experience with a “sales pitch”, organic results meet the audience halfway with a targeted and relevant message that delivers value and appeals to their interests.

A quality SEO strategy will cover content across all types of intent, including:

• Informational
• Research
• Transactional
• Commercial
• And more

By doing so, your web traffic from organic search will have a higher conversion potential than most other traffic sources.