Hello everyone. I’m back with some more information for those of you interested in small businesses SEO and trying to make marketing decisions on how to dive in to internet marketing. SEO is an enormously growing industry because it gives you a great return on investment, when done properly.
I think the most common issue with SEO and for success in any endeavor is how you measure success. Some of the biggest scams in SEO are related to your search ranking. Never measure your success in SEO by your search rankings. It is the quickest and easiest way to see yourself online, but it can be very misleading. Though my headline refers to first page rankings not mattering, it isn’t so much that they don’t matter, but when they matter.
In other forms of business we measure results by the bottom line. Why don’t people do this with SEO? I run in to many business owners who feel they are fine with SEO because when people search their business name in Google, they show up on the first page. This is great, but you are only showing up for people who already know your business name, and most likely, unless you have a very generic business name, you would have a high ranking without even doing significant optimization on your site.
Other owners will say we have a lot of first page rankings and mention some keywords. This is another situation where they have something that looks good if you just look at rankings, but often times the high rankings they have are for terms that nobody ever really searches for, or their ranking is because they are in the search engines local maps section and has nothing to do with SEO.
How should you measure your SEO results?
Look at the traffic coming to your site. If you are an online store, measure the conversions that come in from the search engines. If it isn’t quite as simple as that you can measure your traffic and keep asking your customers where they heard about you. With a good SEO program, you should see more customers coming to you via the internet and it should be a noticeable difference. If not, then it isn’t really helping. Getting new customers is what it is all about right? Just make sure you are using the right measuring stick. Rankings are great, if they are for the right keywords, but rankings without actual traffic to your site is really nothing.
