Article written by Wild Iris Marketing team member Mindy Hanson.
I tend to see analogies to digital marketing all over the place. Recently I was at a park watching kids play on the merry go round and teeter totter and realized that they reminded me of clients trying to manage SEO and keywords. I know that sounds weird but hear me out!
No one knows your business like you do. Chances are, no one knows what people are searching for in Google to find you better than you do… Or do they?
We recently worked with a client who was certain she knew what keywords people were Googling to find her business. She spent time writing new copy for her website so she would be found for the words she knew people were looking for. She launched the updated website and, her organic search traffic plummeted. She contacted us to see if we could identify what had changed and why.
We ran a keyword analysis of her website and what we found was shocking to all of us. The words that she had assumed were what people used to find her, were not even registering and other words that had never occurred to her that were removed in the “update” had actually been her top keywords! Just like a kid, you can jump on the swing that is search ranking and pump your legs feverishly but if someone else is holding the chains of the swing, you are going to go nowhere.
Let’s say for example you are a business accountant in Lakewood, Colorado. You might assume that “business accountant” and “Lakewood” would be what people are looking for when they find you. However, due to the way search algorithms work, those might not be doing any good for you at all! Add in the fact that the big companies are likely spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to appear first for those words and you may not even show up in the first 5 pages of listings. So what can you do?
We have tools that allow us to run an analysis of your current web traffic and find out what phrases you are showing up in searches for. Additionally, we can run these same reports on your competitors or others in your industry to see what keywords people are using to find them.
In this case, instead of “business accountant” people were actually finding our client most commonly with the phrases “business bookkeeping” “business tax preparation” and “reputable accountant in Lakewood”. With some editing of text (and a few under the hood changes), our client saw an immediate increase in organic traffic and client conversions!
“Within 3 weeks of the SEO Analysis and Keyword Optimization, revenue from newly signed clients far surpassed the cost to do the work. I can not thank you enough AlphaPixel Reach!” ~BH
Great news right? Yes, in the short term.
However, SEO and keyword ranking is much like that playground teeter-totter. Not everyone can be up at the same time. There’s only one first page of Google search results, and only a few can occupy that space. So, work will need to be done to improve your search ranking and then (depending on your industry and if you competitors are paying attention), changes outside of your site might push you back down. In that case, you might need to do additional optimization and maintenance in the weeks, months or years following to keep yourself in front.
So, it is time to get off the merry-go-round of subpar search ranking and jump on the teeter-totter and jump up! We think you will enjoy the results and the view from the top!