SEO: Reaching Top Rankings

By Joe Cunningham, Internet Marketing Manager
10/21/2013

Both professionals and non-professionals agree: SEO (search engine optimization) is an extremely frustrating game to play!  It requires constant work, meticulous strategizing, ongoing effort, and a myriad of tactics.  However, if you “win,” you win big.

Winning Big

How big is big?  97% of people use the internet to search for products and services before going anywhere else.  That’s why you probably don’t get a phone book anymore.  95% of all clicks go to the top 10 (first page) of Google searches, 75% go to the top 3 choices, 45% go to #1.  Hint: you wanna’ be #1.

Even better: Google Adwords will tell you approximately how many people look for keywords per month both in terms of global and domestic users.

Scarves

Let’s say you sell scarves.  You look up all the keywords related to the scarves you sell and group their searches per month together (scarves, flannel scarves, plaid scarves, winter scarves, fleece scarves, etc.).  Let’s say there are altogether about 50,000 searches per month in the US for these keywords.  If you rank #1 for all of these keywords, you will get almost half of them to go to your website.  That’s about 25,000!  A good website conversion rate for any site is about 5%.  So imagine you sell something to 5% of those people – that’s 1,250 sales!  Imagine your average sale is about $25; you just sold $31,250 in product.  Take away maybe half of that for overhead: you still made about $15k – in a month!  Keep up the SEO and you are banking 200k a year.  Not.  Bad.  At.  All.  And that’s just scarves.

MoneyHitting the Top

I have reports emailed to me daily about how our website is doing (traffic, what people are looking at, what people search to find us, traffic from social networks, etc.) and I’ve been noticing since we’ve starting blogging daily, our blog posts have not only been getting a lot of reads, but people are staying on those pages for a good chunk of time (great for SEO), and searching keywords relating to these topics to get there.

One in particular was my post on “Google Analytics for Dummies” where I tried to explain the complex but extremely helpful world of GA to the rest of the world.  People were staying on this blog post for 10, 30, even 50 minutes!  We started to get about 30 or most views for this post alone a day.  I searched its ranking for “Google Analytics for Dummies” and we are #2 (on Google) across the whole world wide web!  That’s awesome!

Jesse Clayton, our Art Director, showed me his blog post on “Less Is More” in advertising is #4 for “less is more advertising” across the globe as well.  There’s no exhilarating feeling quite like it.

Come to think of it, everyone in the office has had their blog posts searched for and found for keywords related to them.  Bunch of winners we've got here.

We’ve been trying to rank for about 30 keywords for a while.  SEO takes time.  Didn’t see the needle move for a good 3 months, and then – boom!  We were on the first page for a bunch.  We are #1 for one, and on the first page for a dozen more now, thanks to a lot of continuous effort.  And the results are coming in too: conversions on our website (people wanting to hire us).

The keyword here is patience.  And before that is effort.  And after that is success.

 Before and After SEOHow to Hit the Top

Well, I just said it in three words, but if you want more details, read my blog about what, why and how to “SEO.”  Based on an ROI analysis like the one I outlined above, you will find investing in SEO is not as costly as you may think.

A friend of mine in the same business explains it like this.  Imagine you are a dentist.  Signing up one patient to stay with you over the years is worth about 30k to your business.  Doing SEO for your website, paying a few grand for SEO, and getting just one new patient still produces an incredible ROI.  It’s almost a no-brainer.

Not everyone is a dentist, but you probably sell more than just scarves.  Consider the options: if you don’t do SEO, you’re missing out on 97% of the business.  Just sayin.’

If you’re interested in learning more or starting your own SEO campaign for your website, get our free SEO analysis (takes only a minute to fill in the info) and contact us right now.

 

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