Sales Slumping This Winter? Invest In An SEO Spring!

Happy Groundhog Day!

The likelihood that Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow is about an 85% chance, based on that fact that from 1887 to 2018 he has seen his shadow 104 times (meaning 6 more weeks of winter) and he has not seen his shadow 18 times (meaning spring is on the way!).

What we’re going to talk about today is making your own sunshine by looking at how you can begin investing in the long-term health and growth of your business.

But first…

Question: What is the difference between a struggling business and a growing/thriving business?

Answer: Leads

For example, we talk to ~100 agencies every month who want to send us their customers to have us white label our SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, and website development services.

In our experience, the agencies that really thrive work on their SEO and rank for terms people are searching for in the agency world and pull in 10’s to 100’s of leads every month.

We have 400+ agency partners and this is a broad stroke look at what our largest partners are doing vs what are smallest partners are doing.

Largest Partners to Smallest Partners

Has SEO Rankings at a national scale generating 100’s of inquiries a month – Largest partners
Has SEO Rankings at a local level generating 10’s of inquiries a month
Heavily networks and receives lots of referrals
Pays for Google Ad / Facebook ad campaigns to generate leads

Relies heavily on cold email / LinkedIn messaging to generate interest – Smallest partners, as you can see from this dataset SEO tends to reign king. Why is that?

Why is SEO so Important?

Here are a few reasons:

You make an upfront investment into content and it pays long-term returns in leads, so you pay less per lead over the long-term.
When you rank customers automatically assume you have more authority in the space compared to if you pay for an ad.
You aren’t limited by budget! When running Google ads, you will probably have a budget, and once it is exhausted your ad stops showing, not to mention if you don’t have high quality scores you’ll have a low impression share. Whereas with SEO rankings you show up all of the time! (granted if Google sees you’re providing a valuable experience to those that are visiting your website)

So now that you understand the value, where should you start with your SEO investment? After all, there are so many keywords to pick from! Below I will detail our comprehensive analysis approach to building an SEO Strategy. We ultimately put together 6 reports to best determine what needs to be done. This process takes 3 weeks to complete and then we sit down with our customer/partner in a 1-hour long meeting to review all of our findings.

These reports include:

Keyword Report– Define exact keywords and search phrases that users are searching on the Internet as well as the monthly search volume. This activity will give you an idea of the potential traffic searching for your products/services on a monthly basis. We extensively brainstorm with our customers/partners to create this list and use a variety of toolsets to find every variation and permutation of those initial concepts so we can identify the greatest amount of low hanging fruit in their industry.
Initial Website SEO Analysis– A broken website is an inefficient website, and it’s A LOT HARDER to rank. Our software will look at website speed test, images load times for each page, broken URLs, as well as other areas as it affects search engines from crawling the site. The website’s structure is a critical factor in good SEO. The layers or “hierarchy” of any website structure is extremely important to a successful SEO project.
Competition Analysis– This report will help us identify your site’s authority as it relates to each keyword in the keyword report and calculates how hard or easy it will be to achieve improved rankings and thus traffic. Our goal is to help our customers and partners to get a return on your investment sooner rather than later. Thus, why we try to find as much low hanging fruit as possible. Just because SEO takes time, doesn’t mean we want you to wait around for a year or longer to see progress/improvement. Keywords and search phrases are organized into a timeline of easiest to hardest, so then we can focus on optimizing keywords that can be won in the search engine on the front page while working on the more difficult keywords that can take longer.
Initial Ranking (Benchmark)– This report shows where you currently rank for keywords and search phrases today. Accountability is a vital and necessary part of any good SEO company. In our benchmark report, we will be able to compare where you previously ranked with where you are ranking in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc. Moving forward we continue to run reports benchmarking our efforts. We will run such reports generally every three to five weeks to measure the success of the SEO project.
Initial Competitive Intelligence Analysis– This step involves looking at who your top 10 competitors for the keywords and search phrases are, and where they rank for each keyword. As part of strategy and setting expectations, we must know who your competitors are online and where they rank for the same keywords we’re going after. This analysis can help us dissect competitive websites and give us distinct advantages. This will also help fuel our overall strategy. Finding out what competitors are doing and then determining if you should apply the same approach is an excellent starting point.
Backlink Strength Report– This report contains many mathematical details on the strength of your inbound links to the pages within your website. Every link that comes from another website or blog has a mathematical value called citation flow that will be reported. These links, depending upon what site they are coming from, the age of the domain, the content on the website, and other areas can either hurt or help your website. Building a solid backlink program that is steady in progression and rich in relevant content is vital to quality structure of SEO.

You’ve Completed the SEO Analysis, now what?

Once you have a solid SEO Strategy the next step is execution. Our process is to build a 90-day strategic plan and specifically lay out what we’re going to accomplish.

Most Strategic Plans Include some or all the following:

On-Page Optimization:

Content Creation for keywords you’re not currently ranking on.
Content augmentation for keywords you are ranking for but need to improve upon:

Writing quality title tags.
Writing quality H1 tags.
Making sure the Title/H1 isn’t the same.
Using content that is competing against each other on your site to assist each other.
Updating met descriptions.
Updating alt tags.
Making the content more keyword rich.

Off-Page Optimization:

Discovering backlink building opportunities and completing outreach to generate additional backlinks which could include the following

Partner websites
Supplier websites
Your Customer’s websites
Industry-related media websites
Affiliate websites

2. Toxic backlink disavowal which is a whole process

Starting by discovering poor quality backlinks
Requesting the site remove the link to your site
Checking back 2 weeks later to see if the link is removed
Submitting records showing the request was made to Google and disavowing the site and their links to your site.

There are a lot of factors to starting your SEO journey, however, if you’re ready for your PPC winter to end and your SEO Spring to being we must start somewhere.