There is a perception within some businesses that content marketing just doesn’t work anymore because of the amount of people and businesses doing it. Everywhere we look there are websites, blogs, and landing pages, and it seems that if you just throw something onto the internet it will just add to all the noise.
Well, you’re absolutely correct. If you put just anything on the internet chances are – it will never be seen. However, there are still so many opportunities on the internet to take full advantage of the millions of web surfers everyday and turn them into buyers. When you understand what search engine optimization (SEO) is, and understand how to utilize it, the internet stops becoming an ocean to get lost in and starts becoming a way to find some of the best leads and customers.
Here is a crash course on SEO and how to use it:
What is SEO?
Whether its Bing, Google, or Yahoo, people are always searching the internet and typing words into the search bar, and if you’re a business, of course you would want your website or blog closer to the top of the results. That’s what SEO is: a discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results, in other words, helping your page be closer to the top.
How does SEO work?
Search engines like Google have crawlers that go out and gather information about all the content on the Internet. These crawlers bring all all that information back to the search engine and build an index. That index then goes through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.
There are a lot of factors that go into that algorithm, but the main key component is keywords and how they’re used.
So what is a keyword?
A keyword is whatever you type into that search engine. It can be one word or a phrase such as a question. Whatever the keywords are, Google finds them in your blog or website and keeps that information in their index so that when someone types in that keyword into their browser, your page will show up somewhere in the mass of pages.
Now that we’ve defined everything let’s ask, how can we use keywords in order to make our page or blog more visible?
The first step is choosing the right keyword. Understand that the game for who’s at the top is very competitive. If you’re a small car dealer, then you’re competing with companies like Carmax and Autotrader who have huge budgets for purchasing places for keywords such as ‘car buying.’
But don’t get too discouraged yet. Big companies try to claim domain over the simple keywords all the time, but there is a tool called the longtail keyword and it will become your friend. A longtail keyword is a keyword that usually is a longer phrase that is more specific to what people are searching for. For example, if I type in ‘how do I find an affordable car in Chicago’ then whatever pages use that phrasing will be more likely to show up at the top of my search results. To put it more simply, the more specific your keywords are, the less competitive they become.
How do you determine what keyword you should use? Tools like Hubspot are great resources when determining how competitive a keyword is and how often people search that keyword. But there are also tools such as KWFinder and Keyword Tool, that are great resources on finding good longtail keywords.
No need for luck!
Blindly generating content is not going to get you far these days, but with a focused strategy and utilizing good SEO methodology you will start generating content that gets the right prospects on to your site. Then it is time to convert them. Download our free 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas to make sure you are doing something with that web traffic.
