Is your SEO Strategy Strong or Weak? And would you know the difference?

Small and growing businesses share a major challenge:
an unlimited amount of tasks and not enough hours/staff to complete them all.

 

Both must prioritize and ensure that the methods they choose to market their business are efficient and providing a positive Return on Investment (ROI). It is not always easy to calculate the return from search engine optimization (SEO) since it is a long-tail strategy, but utilizing google analytics and other software to determine site traffic is a great place to start. Hiring a consultant or marketing agent allows these businesses to analyze and improve their search engine optimization without taking time away from their day-to-day tasks.

Emarketer.com recently produced an article comparing B2B and B2C SEO strategies, and what these businesses found as effective and difficult tasks. These charts will help you decide what is worth doing in-house and what would be important to out-source to a professional based on difficulty.

 

Of course these tactics will vary in effectiveness based on the industry, but this chart should act as a solid overview of how to compare your SEO strategies, difficulties, and future outlook.

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A Few Helpful Hints to Take Away from these Marketing Charts

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Updating Website Content

Google loves fresh content, and so do your readers. Producing new and interesting content will skyrocket your page in the searches, stimulate reader interest, and provide new opportunities for searches and keywords. Marketing professionals did not list this as a difficult tactic and should be used by all companies interested to increase traffic. A static website just does not cut through the clutter in 2013.

Keyword Management

Whether using google’s keyword tool or a 3rd party product, keyword research is vital to an effective SEO strategy. There are many options to help with research, but most importantly you should be expanding into new strategies and not focus on one single search engine query. Expand your website’s content with new keywords, find what has attracted in new users and build your strategy off reader comments and website analytics.

Creating Original Content

Higher in difficulty, creating consistent content can be a challenge and was reported as such by the surveyed marketing professionals. Creativity can go a long way when developing news stories, articles, reports and other content to feature on a blog. Using this creativity to create a foundation for news stories and twitter feeds helps to build links back to the site and show that you are a thought leader within your category. It is generally recommended that a business outsource original content to a professional that will help pull new information from the business and develop a consistent posting strategy. The new information should still be coming from the organization, but hiring a mediator will help to reduce strain on the organization.

Social Media Integration

Now that your business has content flowing, it will start ranking higher in the search engines. With the rise of social networks, news feeds are vitally important to increased and targeted web traffic. After posting new content always share it within your social media strategy (twitter, facebook, pinterest, tumblr, etc.). With particularly interesting content it helps to spend a few extra dollars a day to buy ads on facebook. They are the most targeted and affordable means of online advertising, acting as a very effective platform to share new videos, blog articles and products.

These four effective search engine optimization strategies will help improve traffic on your site as well as your company branding. Users expect transparency from businesses and want to interact. Powering your website, blog, and social media with fresh content can seem difficult and tedious, but once you get the ball rolling there are a plethora of options to explore new topics with your followers while also improving SEO.

This post was inspired by Getting the Most ROI out of SEO by the all knowledgeable emarketer.com. They summarize the findings of their survey as such, “When it comes to actually deciding how their SEO strategy is performing, nearly half of both B2Bs and B2Cs said conversion rate was the most useful metric, pointing again to how those businesses with the least successful SEO strategies might improve. Website visitor traffic and trend, and search rankings by keyword also saw similarly high levels of interest among both types of companies, cited by about two out of five each.”

Contact Tower Agency for assistance analyzing and implementing your updated SEO strategy.