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Sound SEO advice doesn’t come at a steep discount. Two years of corporate content development doesn’t make one an SEO expert.
SEO specialists worth their salt are more than keyword jockeys. They understand coding and HTML, website architecture (how pages are organized), UX (user experience), and writing, among other things. If they can’t do the work themselves, they delegate and monitor website tasks with a trained eye.
Until you fix the gaping holes in your store experience, you’ll be throwing good advertising money after bad. Driving new customers to a store that falls spectacularly short of basic expectations is a fool’s errand. You don’t have to be Warren Buffet to see that.
Yet that’s precisely what many business owners do to boost their faltering websites. Even multi-million dollar corporations bungle into the trap. They interpret flagging sales as a traffic problem when in fact, their traffic doesn’t translate to sales. It doesn’t convert.
Small business SEO is highly competitive. Corporations, review sites, and national chains have brand recognition and a huge advantage over Ma & Pa’s Plumbing — not to mention your direct competitor down the street who’s ramping up his website.
And that’s why the so-called “free” traffic is never free. Someone qualified has to optimize the site to generate “free” traffic. SEO expertise isn’t cheap. Websites can’t be optimized in a single pass and certainly not in a day.
93% of customers use online searches to find a local business. They don’t dig through the mail for the flyer you sent out on Friday or drive around town to find you.
No — they enter a search for “plumber near me” or some other local term, and maybe, just maybe, your site pops up in the results.
We’re guessing that it doesn’t, though. Life is tough for small business information sites, especially when they don’t hold much information.
Lesson 1, quite obviously, is to allow people to do their jobs, especially if they’re more qualified than you and closer to the action.
Lesson 2 is the point of this blog rant: Never value keyword rank over total organic traffic. Rank doesn’t always translate to revenue.
Most small business websites see fewer than 16 daily visits. That’s not enough to justify the long hours and thousands of dollars sometimes invested in them. Only about 15% of all websites get 200 daily visits or more.
This hard fact of life on the internet seems almost counterintuitive; after all, with millions of internet users conducting billions of searches every day, there should be plenty of traffic to go around, right?
