Do you ever get tired or burnt out from social media? Always the need to show up and be present online, reply to messages and DM's in a timely manor, constantly trying to figure out how the algorithm works, and keep up with the ever changing trends!?🤪
Even if you've just started having FUN with creating Reels on IG and making TikToks... how much of your time and effort on those platforms is actually converting into sales??
Social media has it's pros and cons, yes - its free to use and market your business but it takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to see results. You really need to build up the know, like, and trust factor with your audience no matter what platform you're using. And personally, that's not where I want to be spending all of my time.
Early in 2022 I started looking into other ways that I can generate leads for my business. Email marketing often comes up as another way to grow your business online without social media, and I already had a strong email list (I love my email community🥰). But something else I kept finding in my research was SEO. As a website designer, I only know the very basics of SEO so I reached out to one of my biz besties who is an SEO Expert and started asking her about how I could benefit from an SEO campaign.
After working with Ashley for only 3 short months on optimizing my website for search engines, I started getting WAY more traffic on my site, more views on my blog posts, and I started receiving multiple leads each week.🤯 These were random people finding my services on google and filling out the contact form or the application form on my website.
How would it feel to have clients and customers contacting you from a google search!?
That was the goal for me - leads on autopilot! Which also meant spending less time on social media.
I was so impressed after seeing these results for myself that I wanted to start offering SEO services to my website clients, so I asked Ashley to join the VB Team as our SEO Specialist!
Since we've started offering this as a service, I've talked a little bit about SEO on our Instagram stories and several people have reached out with questions, so we wanted to give you the full deets and explain how we're supporting our clients with generating leads through SEO... starting with the basics!🙃
What is SEO?
‘SEO’ stands for ‘search engine optimization’ and in simple terms, it’s optimizing your known
ranking factors to influence Google’s rankings. There are three main components to an SEO
strategy and they are...
On-Page SEO
This includes everything that we can influence on your website. From H1 headings, to quality
content, to meta titles/descriptions, to internal linking, this component is all about “on-page”
ranking factors (psst all of our web design clients get basic on-page SEO with their website). On-page SEO is really important for helping Google to determine what your website/pages are all about!
Off-Page SEO
This includes everything that we can influence off of your website. This includes Google My
Business profiles, citations, social media, backlinks, etc. Off-page SEO is really important to
show Google that your website is an authority and encourage them to rank your high quality
content higher!
Technical SEO
Technical SEO includes everything related to the infrastructure of your website. This includes
sitemaps, core web vitals, page speed, URL structure, schema markup, and more. Technical SEO is often disregarded or left out, but can be a huge influence on rankings (especially since the major web performance-based updates in 2021)!
Who Needs SEO?
If you have a website, you can benefit from SEO. Period. There’s a common misconception that
just because you have a website you will begin gaining organic traffic. While this does happen
occasionally, if you aren’t actively implementing a content and optimization strategy, you are
missing out on a ton of potential traffic (and clients!).
I’m a Local Business – Do I Need SEO?
If you run a local business, for example: a health clinic, consulting company, spa, private practice,
yoga studio, or anything with a physical location, you can benefit from local SEO. Did you know
almost 50% of Google searches are for a local-based product or service? When was the last time you searched “coffee shop near me”? Surprise, that's a local search! You’re missing a huge opportunity if you are a local business and your website isn’t optimized for local search.
I’m an Online Business – Can I Still Benefit From SEO?
If you have an online business, our strategy will be slightly different, but still effective. A blogging and content strategy is a great way to help establish authority in your niche, both for your audience and search engines. This also supports your SEO efforts through effective keyword usage and content structuring. This option is for entrepreneurs with online practices, coaches, bloggers, designers, influences, content creators, or tech companies. Pretty much anyone with an online business looking to reach an organic audience at a non-location specific level can benefit from this!
As a business owner, you know the constant pressure to be doing ALL of the marketing things. But a proper SEO strategy should take away this overwhelm – not add to it!
Investing in a custom SEO strategy will help you bring in organic traffic to your website, but it will also give you important insight into what your target audience is searching for about your products and services (yes - we do the research for you!). A high-quality strategy for your website and blog should also give you more content ideas to pull from for your email marketing and social media to ensure everything is working together synergistically, to maximize your efforts. We're all about repurposing content (especially when it's been well researched!).
While we can all agree that having a stunning website is a necessity in today’s competitive digital age, what happens behind the scenes and on the back end of your website is equally as important.
I hope this was helpful and might have you considering investing in SEO.🤗
XOXO
Shayah