Today I am going to talk to you about two things that are equally important. One has to do with on your site and the other has to do with factors off of your site. As you all know, I’m a firm believer in onsite optimization.
We don’t offer any off page optimization here at the company because it just changes too much, and I’m being nice when I leave it at that. But to give you an example of why off-page SEO is a fool’s errand, here’s and example:
One day you could be chugging along doing everything perfect and then the next day Google says, well we hate that traded links with other local companies in your area and now you are on page 254.
If you made your living off of organic traffic, you just got screwed.
What we do know is that content is always going to trump everything else on the web because Google has a huge appetite to consume fresh, new info. As long as you are creating great content on your site you’re always going to do much better generating traffic that turns into new business.
But even the best on-site optimization today is still set up to do poorly or not succeed if you don’t have a social mechanism tied to it. If you don’t have your social outposts promoting your site and your business then the overall effect of the site is going to suffer compared to your competitors who do work on social media.
Facebook and Twitter are branding and PR opportunities. They get your foot in the door. They give you exposure. If you’re building a presence in social media and you’re regularly updating and posting and engaging with your readers and followers then you have a much better chance of reaching buyers versus just sitting idly by waiting for someone to type your name or line of business into the search bar.
It’s the law of large numbers; be in as many places as you can effectively be (notice I said effectively) and plant flags and grow your farm. You are a farmer. On average, each zip code in a given area does five million dollars a year in home improvements, how much of that are you getting?
So if you are just nibbling around the edges with social media and blogging and creating fresh content for your site, you need to realize there’s a lot of moving parts online, and over the next couple of years there are going to be many factors that determine whether your business succeeds or suffers, but know this; it’s not all about search results anymore. It’s about giving people many ways to find you, and once they do, getting them to know, like and trust you enough to reach out to you.