At some point, every business needs to improve their online marketing. If you have the budget you should begin doing it immediately. For smaller businesses, this isn’t necessarily an option, so it’s time to start investing your time instead.
By the time you ever walk through the front door to speak with an SEO consultant, or a full-blown SEO firm, you need to have a clear idea in mind of who you are, what you want to accomplish, and what it’s going to take to get there. Anything short of that will lead you to overpaying, and failing to understand the “why” behind the SEOs recommendations. Plus, by giving yourself a working knowledge of the following, you are less likely to fall victim to one of the many fly-by-night consultant’s and firms who take your money and fail to deliver any real results.
Understanding the process starts with introspection. Are you ready to reach into the depths of your company and pull out a deeper understanding of what makes it work? If not, any marketing work done on your behalf is going to cost you a fortune, and it could quite well fail to deliver the results you were hoping for. The key to great SEO is understanding what it takes to get you from where you are to where you want to be. That’s a goal that’s easier to manage if you can answer the following questions.
Who are your competitors?
There’s no excuse not to know who your competitors are both now, and who you could potentially compete with in the future. If you were the owner of a local burger joint and were asked who competitor’s competitors were, your answer would probably be the local McDonald’s and Dairy Queen.
What most in this position fail to understand is, you aren’t competing with McDonald’s or Dairy Queen. You make a superior product at roughly double the cost. This isn’t competition. The competition is the Italian restaurant next door and the sandwich shop on the corner. People don’t take to the search engines to search for a McDonald’s hamburger. When they take that much effort, they want a delicious, melt in your mouth burger that only a smaller place can deliver.
You have to understand that competition doesn’t just mean “they make the same thing as me.” Your real competition is the two local spots on the corner – even though they don’t make the same kind of food as you. They’re both within walking distance of your restaurant, and both are options that could potentially take money out of your pocket. McDonald’s isn’t a competitor because the bulk of the people going there are looking for a quick meal. They don’t have time to wait 20 minutes for the best burger and fries they’ve ever eaten. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
What are your goals?
Most would say “to earn more money,” but this isn’t a “real” goal. This is a known. All businesses are in the business to make money.
Goals are things like increasing landing page conversions or developing a stronger sales funnel. These both lead you to more money, but they are actionable, whereas “I want to make more money” is a bit of a given. What you really need to know is how fast you want to get there, and if there are any specific ideas you’d like to try along the way. SEO is like a race, only in this race you can only run as fast as your budget will carry you. Tell your SEO how fast you want to go, and they’ll help you create actionable steps to get there.
Who are your customers?
Good SEOs know that search is about segmentation. Once you know who you are trying to reach, SEO gets cheaper, more efficient, and much more profitable. Instead of saying you want to reach everyone within a 25 mile radius, why not take the time to figure out just who within that radius is actually buying your product?
Once you do that, click prices go down (for paid search), targeting gets easier, and you can really start to implement a plan designed to bring conversions, not just traffic. Traffic is great, but it’s a vanity stat. The stat of real importance comes to light after you know what percentage of your traffic you’re converting. That’s when you can start to segment it and really increase the effort for the “buying” traffic and keywords rather than just throwing money around in the dark on bad SEO.
Is your page optimized for mobile?
Mobile is the future. By 2014, most of the world’s web traffic is going to be viewed on a mobile device. If you aren’t planning for that now, then you’re quickly getting left behind by those who are.
If you aren’t covered on the design elements of the job – specifically your website displaying on mobile devices – then you need to take a step back. You aren’t ready for SEO just yet. Come back once your website is fully functional across a wide variety of devices. Responsive websites are all the rage, and for good reason. With a responsive website, your page looks as good on an iPhone as it does on your desktop at home.
Do you understand your message?
SEO is about content. If you don’t understand the message you’re trying to convey, how are we supposed to create content that facilitates your message? Ask yourself how you want your potential customers to imagine your business when they think of it. This is how you reverse engineer a message to deliver to them. Start with the ideal and work backwards until you have a message that you’d like to deliver.
Hardee’s tries to deliver a message that they’re fast, while being of a higher quality than other burger chains. IKEA preaches design simplicity. What point are you trying to get across?
Once an SEO has a clear understanding of your message, he can begin to tailor a content strategy to fit it. Until then, you’re both working blind and inefficiently.
Understanding the answers to these questions is not only a great starting point for your business in the online marketing world, but also will dive deep into why you’re in business in the first place. Understanding your business better than anyone else in the world, and then being able to spread that vision to others is what separates a good business from a bad business. Dive deep, and answer the hard questions before you ever consider hiring an SEO. You can thank me later.
Image source: https://www.organikhit.net/
