3 Reasons Why You Can’t Learn S.E.O. at a Seminar

So, you just came back from that awesome industry conference, and the hot topic there was S.E.O. (which, from an Internet Marketing standpoint, is incredibly ironic, but I digress). Everyone was abuzz about mind-blowing statistics on increased website traffic just from some simple "tricks" from SEO.  There was even a class with a certified instructor that showed you how you can increase sales and take advantage of SEO for your market.

Here’s the catch: SEO is not a fad. It’s not a new revolution in gaining more customers, and it certainly cannot be done in the weeks and months after this year's conference.

What that instructor failed to mention is that Search Engine Optimization not only takes significant time to actually see any Return on Investment (ROI), but requires you to literally adopt a whole new approach to marketing your brand online, understanding your customer's buying behaviors, and clearly specifying your company's product offerings. Allow me to help paint a much clearer picture:

SEO REASON #1 - YOU SHOULD START WITH ANALYTICS

How can you determine success without measurement tools?  Before you start any marketing campaign, you want to install an analytics tool to help you measure the results.  If we at Gainesville Marketing have ever had the pleasure of meeting you, it’s very possible that we have referred to ourselves as Marketing Scientists. This post about the importance of data in lead conversion explains that further. Without Analytics, you have no data about traffic to your site, and without that data, you are flying blind in regards to SEO. We prefer Google Analytics because, well, its really powerful and easy to use. Oh yeah, and it's completely FREE.

SEO TIP #2 - YOUR SEARCH KEYWORDS:   THINK DEEPER THAN YOUR PRODUCTS OR SERVICES

There could quite possibly be thousands of keyword terms used to find your very specific products or services. Are you able to sit down and really think about all the possible variations used in a search query for all of them? For example:

• What about the market or customer types you serve?
• What territories, cities and/or counties do you serve?

And determining all of these potential keyword terms is only a portion of the process!

• What about the amount of traffic these keyword terms generate?
• What about the competition of these keyword terms? (HINT: the shorter the Keyword term, the greater the odds of high levels of competition).

Oh yeah, and after all of this, you still need to implement these terms into your website for optimization, right? Whew! That’s a lot of time spent already!

SEO TIP #3 - NOT ALL LINKS ARE CREATED THE SAME

So, let’s say that you already have the above steps in place (good for you!), you need to get some links to your site, right?

Good question, but more importantly, not all links are valued the same in the eyes of Google and other search engines. Some are going to carry more weight than others, and as a result, having those links will benefit you more so than having other, lesser-quality links. There are a lot of ways to get high quality, authoritative links to your site; some are considered ethical in the eyes of search engines, while others are not.

Yes, having links will give you credibility, help you rank better in search engines, and increase the traffic coming to your site. Here is the main takeaway from this seminar that the “SEO instructor” neglected to mention: Traffic to your site doesn't pay the bills, traffic converted into leads pay the bills!.