Every business owner wants to rank on the first page, number one on Google. Search engine optimization can be a very valuable investment that can single-handedly transform your company’s ability to attract more customers more easily and cheaply than your competitors. Using a combination of SEO and social media, I’ve helped companies grow from $3 million a year to over $1 million in 7 months and changed the way a multi-billion dollar industry is marketed.
However, despite this, I spend a lot of time keeping people away from SEO. The reality is that unless you invest around $50,000 per year, you probably won’t get the results you want, and despite good intentions, the typical professional you find won’t be able to deliver what they promise. Worse yet, for most people, if you get the rankings you want and the traffic you want, you probably still won’t get the actual sales conversions you want.
Fortunately, the most important factor in making SEO work for you is also the factor in creating an efficient website and significantly increasing your online sales. It’s all summed up in one word: value.
Create engaging, value-driven content that captures the attention of readers and wows them.
The most important ranking factor never changes, everything else does.
By far the most important ranking factor Google considers is how many people visit your site directly, how much time they spend reading it, and whether they visit more pages. People visiting your site are telling Google directly that you must be trustworthy because people are visiting the page themselves. The other two revolve around the quality of your content and whether it actually brings value to readers.
Google’s primary directive to improve its search product is to provide the most appropriate answer to a searcher’s question. The better your answers to the questions people are looking for, the higher your ranking and the higher your conversion rate. This means that insightful, engaging and valuable content that is different from the competition will always be the main driver of search results.
SEO is about editing and promoting content, not ranking.
There are hundreds of optimizations that are all technical. Think of these as edits, similar to how proofreaders edit articles. All that is done is to optimize and change the language slightly, and add metadata, schemas (JSON-LD), and other technical aspects to “tune” how the algorithm handles content data.
The other part, often called backlinks, is really just another way of saying it. The more people citing your content, the higher it will rank over time because it’s valuable. People try to trick the system by buying backlinks of questionable quality, which means when a big Google algorithm hits, they start losing everything they work on as Google starts eliminating bad sources of “backlinks”.
Editors can’t make bad content good, and promoters can’t make bad content popular. This means that even taking into account the technical factors involved in SEO, the common answer is: make good content that people actually find valuable to read.
Forget keywords, write content based on content but customer issues.
The easiest way to focus on what people actually want to read is to do what you do as a professional: answer the questions that matter to your clients. When you create content around the questions your customers are actually asking you and answer them in a way that you actually do in person: you get content that people actually want to read because it’s important to them.
If all you do is get into the habit of writing down or taking notes of questions your clients ask, answering them yourself in a way that works for you, and then turning them into articles, you’ll be ahead of the curve Search engine competition because you create valuable and insightful content that drives the whole thing.
