SEO success with social proof
Get the basics of your business in order. SEO. It’s one of the most overused (and misunderstood) acronyms in digital marketing. It’s also crucial for building brand awareness and visibility.
John Doe
Co-founder | CEO | Senior Marketing Manager
22 June, 2023 • 2 min
What is SEO?
SEO, or ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, is a key aspect of targeting future customers and directing unpaid traffic to your website. Search engines such as Google (accounting for 90%+ of search engine queries), send out ‘crawlers’ to pull data from the internet. This data is built into an index, which is fed into an algorithm. This algorithm, or rules engine, works to match the data with a user’s query in hierarchical order. Unlike paid advertising, SEO relies on organic methods of drawing traffic to your website.
What does SEO success look like?
Successful SEO means your website will appear highly ranked (i.e., near the top) when a consumer is looking for a product or service matching yours via search engine queries on Google or Bing.
The obvious benefits to improving the quality and quantity of traffic flow include:
Higher brand visibility
Faster sales cycles
Increased profit margins
Local brand awareness
How do I improve my SEO?
According to Neil Patel, there are two approaches to SEO, one being outdated and ineffective, the other being critical to improving your ROI.
What are the two SEO mindsets?
- Old SEO is focused on ranking and pages, and on using single keywords over long-tail keywords
- New SEO involves taking an ROI-focused approach that is geared towards your customer’s experience
Taking the form of Google reviews and SEO copywriting, the new SEO approach considers the human aspect of the buyer journey. In other words, it is deeply focused on quality of engagement over metrics alone.
How do I focus on ROI over metrics alone?
Providing your customers with enriching, shareable content on an easy-to-navigate website builds trust and quality inbound traffic. This creates what is called a ‘natural link profile’, which in turn makes your website ‘search engine friendly’.
When talking about creating engaging content for your customers to improve search engine rankings and ROI, local SEO is a great place to start.
Incorporating reviews
Incorporating reviews from real customers is the best way to improve SEO. Understandably, 83% of people trust user reviews over paid advertising
Create engaging content
Create content that keeps customers engaged when they land on your website. When customers form an affinity with your brand, they are more likely to use and refer your business
Longtail keywords
Use long-tail keywords to draw up to 70% more genuine traffic to your website. Be hyper-specific in your blog titles and meta description tags
Local SEO
Zero in on local SEO* opportunities. This helps to target and reach niche markets in ways you may not have before.
Speed up your website
Check your website loading time, both on mobile and desktop. If it takes more than 2 seconds to load, you have work to do. Learn how to speed up your website loading time here.
*What is local SEO?
Local SEO is about zeroing in on keywords and content specific to your geographic area and customer base.
Reviews are the number one way to create hype and brand awareness to improve your local SEO. Reviews work to target market groups within a set proximity to each other, leading to genuine connections and understanding between your customers and your brand.
Local SEO helps crawlers to index your content for keyword-specific related searches, meaning your SEO ranking improves dramatically.
Local SEO is about zeroing in on keywords and content specific to your geographic area and customer base.
Reviews are the number one way to create hype and brand awareness to improve your local SEO. Reviews work to target market groups within a set proximity to each other, leading to genuine connections and understanding between your customers and your brand.
Local SEO helps crawlers to index your content for keyword-specific related searches, meaning your SEO ranking improves dramatically.
Here are some examples to cover a variety of different SEO strategies.
For the best outcome, a business should incorporate all (or most), of the strategies we cover below.
Example 1:
Reviews & SEO – GRUBBY HANDS CAFÉ
A new café in Melbourne’s CBD has been struggling to keep up with its competitors, even though new customers claim it’s the best coffee around. The café owners decide to improve SEO with a website-integrated review platform. Staff set up an iPad at the cash register and encourage each happy customer to leave a review and a star rating. As an extra incentive, each customer that uploads a photo of their meal and a Google review receives a free coffee. This gives Google crawlers lots of auto generated content that is both local and stacked with keywords for the café. Within months, they need to hire new staff to cater to the influx of customers.
Example 2:
Blogs & Local SEO – NO SWEAT GYMS
A gym located in Sydney NSW is looking to grow its business and increase its service offering. They haven’t had much success with their website, named ‘Big Sweat Gyms’. Most leads are located 25km+ away, so they change their overarching webpages to ‘Inner West Sydney Big Sweat Gyms’. Then, using local knowledge as inspiration, they post helpful, shareable blogs covering such topics as – ’Best Supplements Stores in Inner West Sydney’ and ‘The 10 Best Parks for Outdoor Fitness in Marrickville, Newtown & Erskineville, Sydney’. Within a few weeks, they are receiving more local enquiries than ever before. To improve the service offering for new and existing clients, they create a user-friendly app for clients to book classes, rate workouts and provide feedback. This simple inclusion leads to a 65% increase in class attendance within the first month of its rollout.
Example 3:
Long-tail keywords & website optimisation – SWIFT HAIR SALON
A Brisbane hair salon is finding it hard to justify the money spent on paid Google Ads. Most of their leads are from people who aren’t looking for the premium service they offer. To improve their SEO, they add long-tail keywords to Google Ads, such as ‘premium hair salon west end Brisbane’, and ‘best south Brisbane haircut balayage foils models’. Following a website review, they realise the high quality images in their website gallery has increased the website load time to 10-15 seconds, causing a 98% abandonment rate. To address this issue, they compress all the images in the gallery, reducing the website load time to <2 secs. Within six months, their website abandonment rate is <3%, their clientele has doubled, and they receive a Best Local Hairdresser award nomination.
Improving your SEO doesn’t have to be hard, time consuming, or expensive. Nail these following points to dramatically improve your ROI:
- Activate Google reviews to direct search engine queries straight to your website
- Include your OWN reviews on your site to give Google crawlers fresh content
- Create opportunities for your customers to share their experiences
- Provide your current and future customers with a constant stream of up to date, relevant and timely user-generated content
- Add long-tail keywords that consider the human side of search queries
- Optimise your website load time for a higher Google ranking and reduced abandonment rate
- Focus on the customer experience; be mindful of their needs and their time
Unfortunately, many businesses overlook the most simple, cost-effective, and powerful strategies for improving SEO. Get in touch today and find out the best strategy for your business.
If you’re unfamiliar with SEO and serious about improving your search engine ranking and speeding up sales cycles, get in touch with the team at interact.social.
Australian owned & operated, we provide B2B and B2C companies with single point, fully integrated solutions for optimising SEO and creating seamless customer experiences.
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