VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Part of growing your business is using Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You’ll see a lot of people talking about this, and every small business owner gets these emails saying, “Hey, we’re going to get you to the first page on Google.” Of course, these are lies. There’s a chance that they could, but nobody can guarantee that. But there’s three areas that you can work on to get more traffic to your website. The first is technical, the actual code behind your website. There are certain things that the search engines are looking for, for them to come and index the site. So you have to have those things in order so that the engine will send you traffic. The easiest way to get that in shape is to use Google Search Console. This is a free service that you can set up, and what will happen is you point your site to Google and it will give you reports and basically a whole dashboard of all the things that you need to do so that they will be able to send you more traffic, in case there’s anything blocking Google, if it’s not able to index your site right. Then the other half of it is, is it fast enough? Is it working on phones? Because mobile is really the preferred traffic angle. Are there any technical issues holding you back?
The second area is onsite. That’s the content on your website. You know, is it answering questions, and is it relevant to the searches that are coming in your direction? Having your content straight, pretty much anybody can do that. You don’t need much technical help to do that. You just want to make sure your site has relevant pages and answers the questions that people commonly have.
The third section is offsite. The idea with that is that search engines will drive traffic to you if the rest of the internet says that you’re the resource on that topic. So the practice there is if you hire someone to do that kind of search engine optimization, they’re going to be getting links to your website from other websites. This has come to the point where it can’t just be any website out there. It’s got to be other sites that are also recognized as experts in these fields or as a legitimate directory. Unfortunately, in the past three years or so, this space has really taken a huge hit. We’ve seen a lot of clients getting anywhere from 50 to 90% reduction in their organic traffic, and the reason for this is twofold. One is that they’ve just been turning the screws on advertising. The only way to guarantee somebody searching for a term will get to you is if you place an ad, if you pay to have it at the top of the list. The other one is that now AI is generating summarized results on a lot of search engines, so it’s a lot tougher to do. Still, if you want to have a website that solves customer concerns and brings you traffic. You do want to at least put some effort towards this stuff.
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