Ranking online through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an often misunderstood aspect of digital marketing. Many business owners do not take a systemized approach to online ranking but instead use a slapdash approach that is difficult both to quantify and manage.
Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group and Dennis Yu, Founder and CEO of BlitzMetrics, discussed common SEO misunderstandings in a recent interview on the Systems Simplified podcast. During their discussion, Dennis shared that SEO isn't a one-and-done. Instead, it's a system that amplifies the credibility and visibility of your business. Dennis also shared his six steps for improving SEO in any company.
Read on to discover the six steps. We hope you will utilize them to improve your digital marketing strategy and build a measurable system that consistently works to boost your business.
The Six-Phase SEO Process
1. Install your digital plumbing
Before you can optimize your marketing efforts, your business needs a robust foundation, which Dennis calls "digital plumbing." This means setting up the infrastructure around conversion tracking, Google Analytics, Meta Pixels, and more. The goal is to find out where your marketing sources come from - and where they do not. This can also include finding out what competitors are doing and noting their success rates with their own digital marketing strategies. All of this provides your marketing team with the data they need to make smart choices about where to spend their time and energy.
2. Set your goals
With tracking in place, businesses must define their objectives so that they can understand their success metrics. For example, if a company needs to attract fifty new customers monthly, their team must understand the existing close rate of their sales team, the cost/benefit analysis for longer customer lead times, and calculate their target cost per lead. Without well-defined goals, a marketing team can spend too much time and money boosting the wrong metrics and not attracting high-quality leads.
3. Create content
Content is the fuel for SEO and is the best way to show customers that your company provides value. If a business isn't ranking for a particular service, it's likely because your team hasn't created content around that topic. Content should be educational, authoritative, and engaging, addressing customer pain points and showcasing expertise.
During the interview, Dennis shared that content goes further than an article or what you post on social media. The information your salespeople provide, the way they educate customers, your drip campaigns, brochures, and more are all content. Thinking about content as an overarching narrative for your business will help your marketing team build the brand and provide valuable information that supports both lead nurturing and closed sales.
4. Establish and target your ideal audience
All traffic is not created equal. If your Portland, Oregon design/build business is getting traffic from Portland, Maine, those additional eyeballs on your website are useless. Your marketing team must build an ideal audience avatar and create content targeting them. The goal is to tell search engines and social platforms that the content your team is building is perfect for its target audience. In the case of the Portland, OR business, the goal would be to ensure local homeowners who plan to remodel their homes are connecting with the content.
5. Amplify the content to your target market
Now that you have steps 1-4 in place, you can see that some content performs well organically and provides excellent lead generation. Your team can now amplify this quality content with ad dollars. Dennis recommends using a "Dollar-a-Day" strategy to test and amplify your best-performing content. Your business can scale the reach of winning content by investing small amounts in paid ads across platforms like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn.
6. Finally, optimize and fine-tune your strategy
As Adi always shares, a business system, once built, is never static. Your SEO strategy must be dynamic. Set up a process for improving the system, creating additional content, monitoring metrics to ensure the system continues to work, and finding ways to improve based on performance data.
SEO can be implemented systematically with measurable outcomes. Building a structured approach like the one Dennis shared during the podcast is one great way to ensure your company can get repeatable results from your marketing strategy and scale that process as your business grows.
Could your business benefit from building and implementing scalable systems? Get in touch with the experts at Business Success Consulting Group. Documenting and implementing processes and procedures that support scalability is our specialty.
