SEO is changing by the day, but two facts remain constant: SEO is
relevant, and SEO is
profitable today. How does SEO help your business? Search engines like Google handle billions of search queries daily.
A considerable fraction of these queries are from prospective customers searching for solutions (products and services) in your space. If your website can appear on the right search engine results at the right time, you can be swimming in cool cash. This is what SEO is essentially about. Yes, SEO can be lucrative, but just like any other marketing channel, accountability is paramount. You should be able to measure – and accurately at that – your return on investment (ROI) from the money you are pouring into SEO. This would justify the economic viability of such investment. In this insightful podcast, Kris Reid of Ardor SEO emphasizes why business owners should be leveraging SEO today and how best to maximize SEO to amplify your competitive edge in your space. More than that, Kris takes us through the importance of ensuring your SEO investment counts in terms of ROI like customer acquisition. After all, what does it profit a man to do all the SEO in the world and yet gain no customer?
SEO myths that need to be urgently debunked The SEO industry is fairly old since the early days of the dot-com bubble. And for a gigantic industry projected to hit $80billion in 2020, the SEO space is teeming with myths – some debatable and others outrightly ludicrous. Kris Reid from Ardor points names one of such laughable myths as SEO being dead and paid traffic replacing organic SEO (obtainable from SEO). Let us dig more into this myth relating to Kris's perspective.
Myth 1: Organic traffic is going extinct A lot of things will soon join the dinosaurs in extinction, but not SEO. Organic traffic is yet a surefire way to acquire genuine, top-value, and, more importantly, sustainable customers. Granted, paid traffic like PPC ads is becoming the buzz of the digital marketing industry, but how sustainable are the results? Paid traffic – for example, on search engines like Google – can get you directly on the search pages of prospective customers. But if another company with deeper pockets comes into the bidding war for ad slots, expect your website to be hurled off such search results. As Kris pointed out, a startup with astronomic marketing capital (thanks to being funded by venture capitalists) will blow you off. This makes paid traffic insecure in the face of such volatility. On the other hand, organic traffic is far more sustainable, given the higher barrier of entry. Regardless of a company having billions to throw around, they are definitely not getting into the top pages of search engine results that rapidly. They can't hurriedly buy their way to the top. Organic traffic, as Kris puts it, is far more reliable with your effort compounding over time. This means you wouldn't be waking up one jolly morning and seeing your website crash from the first page of Google to the seventh page speedily. The reverse wouldn't happen either regarding you jumping from the seventh page straight to the first page in a day. SEO results are procedural, progressive, and incremental, little gains adding up. What more, internet users are getting smarter these days. They know websites that appear in the likes of PPC ads bought that place, not
earned from progressively accumulated credibility as in the case of websites that appear organically on their search results. Thus internet users have a habit of skipping such paid ads on Google (for example) to the organic listings below.
Myth2: Paid traffic is cheap Sure, SEO is more long-term compared to the relatively instantaneous results from paid traffic. However, in the long run, SEO turns out more cost-effective for your business. Take Dropbox, for example. In 2009 when trying out Google ads, they discovered that their acquisition cost (CPA) for one customer ranged between $233 — $388. Ridiculously, Dropbox's product back then was just $99. This means they were spending much more on paid traffic for what they were ultimately getting back.
Myth 3: You don't need more than content We know Bill Gates is a smart guy. So when he said in January 1996 that content is king, the whole marketing community jumped right at it, especially SEO webmasters. But much has changed in SEO since the nascent days of the internet when there were just a handful of blogs. Today, there are 1.7 billion websites. Among this mind-blowing number, 500 million have active blogs where they are regularly pumping out content. Would you be alarmed to learn that on WordPress alone, over 70 million posts are published monthly? Amidst these tons of content scattered across the internet today, the internet user already has more than enough to read. Therefore, SEO (in terms of ranking on search results) is far more than just getting doused in coffee and churning out the longest blogs.
As Kris Reid explains, backlinks are crucial to building your SEO rankings on your website. Search engines like Google are actively investigating the websites that are linking to your website and the respective credibility of these websites. This metric informs Google of the value of your content. The more links from authoritative websites, the more Google is convinced you know your stuff as a subject matter expert. Consequently, Google shows your website higher in search queries as they are convinced you are better placed to offer their users top-grade information. Flavoring this with some statistics, we see that 91% of website pages that don't get traffic from Google don't have backlinks.
Why you just can't do without marketing As Kris teaches us, many business owners focus on their product's brilliance, neglecting, or placing far less priority on their marketing. Indeed, your product can be spectacular, but how can your prospective customer know about this fantastic product you have got? This is why a sizable chunk of your budget should be allocated to marketing. Genuine marketing is far less of fulfilling all righteousness; marketing must produce results. Kris Reid ardently believes in the effectiveness of marketing, and not necessarily the artistic elegance. He explains this better in terms of businesses investing thousands of dollars in creating a dazzling website. In the end, the website does not generate any lead or customer, typically because their prospective customers are not coming there. The way Kris Reid sees it, a website is more of a business card. Despite how captivating the design is, the business card is practically useless until you get this charming card in the eyes of your customers. Getting this card before the eyeballs of prospective clients is what SEO does. Pulling in traffic to your website is only half of the job. What fraction of this traffic end up paying customers? Also, how do you measure the results? This brings us to how to calculate your SEO ROI.
How to measure SEO ROI ROI in SEO depicts the effective return on the investment you made into SEO marketing. Commonly, SEO ROI can be measured in metrics like placement in search engine results and consequent traffic. But as Kris sees it, the ROI should extend more than just traffic into more tangible goals like the number of conversions taking place on your website. Keep the technical SEO jargon aside, how many customers are buying from your website?
And if transactions are not being directly executed on your website, how can you accurately set up your conversion tracking? Mathematically, the ROI for your marketing is simply (X-Y)/Y. Here X is the total SEO revenue generated, and Y is the cost of SEO investment. An ecommerce store, for instance, can easily calculate their total SEO revenue directly from the worth of transaction derivable from the traffic they extract from search engines. This can be attainable by leveraging Google Analytics' conversion tracking. But if you are not making sales directly on your website, you may resort to tracking your ROI by setting up conversion goals. This approach is more befitting for lead-based businesses. These conversion goals span actions from your website visitor like joining email lists, free quotes, lead magnet download (or general lead form submission), phone calls, free quotes requests, and even office visits in terms of Local SEO ROI. To more definitively ascertain the monetary value of the revenue generated in this scenario, you have to take a cue from previous sales data in allocating dollar value to every on-site conversion. This will help you ascertain the SEO ROI using the advocated formula.
Focusing on your Queen B role Today, our world is swarmed with DIY (Do It Yourself) enthusiasts, and many business owners are not excluded. Some business owners end up stifling their business by taking on too many auxiliary roles aside from their primary specialization. These business owners – possibly in a bid to save cost – wear multiple hats, being the SEO analysts, social media manager, HR, accountant…and lots more, all at once. This may appear to be saving you money in the short term, but ultimately it would cost you enormously as you lose valuable acceleration and competitiveness. As Kris Reid advises, it is best to focus on your "Queen B" role. This is your area of specialty where you are best positioned to excel. It is good advice to delegate the secondary tasks so you can focus that time on more delicate executive endeavors like driving business growth. And for a niche as specialized (or technical) and exerting as SEO, it is much better to outsource it rather than being bogged down on trying to increase your search engine ranking independently. With the need to delegate your SEO responsibilities established, you must get the right guys to do it. You definitely don't want to send a boy to do a man's job. How then do you hire the right SEO service provider that is perfectly aligned with your business growth? Kris tells us.
Key considerations when hiring an SEO service When hiring an SEO service provider, there are particular factors to consider, guiding you to the right pick.
The SEO service offers you custom solutions Kris Reid says you should be wary of SEO service providers that give you generalized solutions that are not tailored to the unique topography of your market space, brand personality, or website design. This is common with those SEO services that work with a one-size-fits-all template for the multiplicity of their clients. In Kris's words, they shoot from the hip without holistically examining your website and giving you bespoke solutions specially adapted to your brand and website. For example, at Ardor (which Kris runs), before making any recommendations to grow your SEO, their SEO specialists will first give you an explicit website audit before identifying which solutions (given the expansiveness of SEO) that would best work for you.
They take you along Ever had their geeky tech guy blabbed technical jargon all over your face? Yuck! As a business owner – especially one that is not tech-savvy – you don't need to be overwhelmed in the technicality of SEO. Yet the process needs to be as transparent as possible so that ROI is measurable at every point.
You need to be informed (and educated) regularly to ensure you have a say in the decisions that are being executed on your website. This is why you need an SEO company that is very accountable but presents the information in layman language. Kris Reid recommends you go with an SEO provider whose reportage (on the SEO work they are doing for you) is as simplistic as possible, not some SEO geek that would soak you in a deluge of technical gibberish. Who really cares about the technical stuff? What you care about as a business owner is tangible results. How many customers are you getting at the end of the day? The SEO company should be able to accurately tell you this in a straightforward manner.
Do they really know their stuff? There are a thousand and one other places where you can manage with an amateur – but definitely not SEO. When it comes to SEO, you are either getting an expert or a quack, no middle ground. Kris advises you to go with an SEO provider with an impressive resume, one who knows a thing or two about real estate. What clients have they worked with in the past? How satisfied were the clients in terms of results?
Take action on your business and get more customers for your real estate business.
