Welcome to the HeadRoom Resident Guest Post series. This month we’re taking a look at year-end planning for your business. In this post Ellen Thompson, founder of Results Repeat, explains why you should make sure that your business is visible online. 

For many businesses, lead generation is directly correlated to online visibility—aka showing up on the first page of Google (and other search engines) when prospects are searching for products and services relevant to your industry. You improve these odds through search engine optimization, or SEO.

Very simply put, SEO is a discipline that involves editing and adding content to your website and increasing the number of links to your site. The goal of changing the content on your site is to ensure the engines know what you do and where you do it, if applicable.

Since links count as ‘votes’ for a page, those from quality sites let Google know that your business is well reputed. All things being equal, the more trustworthy a site appears, the higher it will rank.

Looking to grow your company’s revenue in 2016? Who isn’t?

The end of the year is a great time to complete an SEO tune-up. Here are three things you can do between now and the end of Q4 to improve rankings.

Identify What You Would Like to Rank For

The first step in the SEO process is to develop a list of keyword phrases your customers would search for to find your type of business. For example, let’s suppose you are an attorney who specialized in elder law. You might want to rank for keywords phrases like “elder care lawyer” or “elder law attorney.” Develop a list of several variations, if possible. If you are a local business, you also need to tell Google where you do business. For example, your office might be in Wayne, PA. You create a target keyword phase list by appending the keyword phase you originally came up with your geography. For example, here is short list of keywords you would create if you were an elder care lawyer in Wayne, PA:

elder care lawyer wayne pa

elder law attorney wayne pa

elder care lawyer in wayne pa

elder law attorney in wayne pa

wayne pa elder care lawyer

wayne pa elder law attorney

Get Them In the Text

Next, you need get those keyword phrases onto your site. Although the finer points of SEO are complicated, the 80/20 rule applies. Getting the keywords into your title tag (what you see when you roll over the browser tab) and making sure they’re included in your web copy accounts for most of the heavy lifting.

Use one or two keyword phases per page and find ways to include them in a way that comes of as natural and doesn’t compromise the experience of your site visitors. (Google is doing a better job of showing you for searches for ‘elder care lawyer wayne pa’ even if you put ‘in’ before ‘wayne.’)

Get Some Link Love

Try to get third-party sites to yours. For example, you can add links from social media sites or business directories. You might also be able to get links from strategic partners or vendors. For example, HeadRoom will link to your site from our Collaboration page. If possible, try to get your linking partner to include your keywords in the text over the link (the ’anchor text’) rather than your website address, company name or generic phrases like ‘click here.’

In some industries where SEO is extremely competitive, e.g., the insurance sector, these tactics might not be enough to get any improvement in, but most small businesses will benefit from even this small amount of SEO investment.

 

Results Repeat offers professional digital marketing services, including Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, and social media management for companies with limited in-house resources. Through effective organization and consistent communication, they deliver more qualified site visits, leads, and sales.