With only four weeks remaining in 2016, Triad Digital Media is turning focus to the upcoming new year and the skills any digital marketer will need to be at their best come January. It is increasingly more apparent that content drives traffic to your website, and can have a significant impact on overall revenue. It can seem a bit daunting at first, but I have broken up these three main skill sets into separate posts, and thought “What better to start off with than SEO.”

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

One thing that’s important to understand as a business owner is what your potential customers are searching for, and the solutions that you can offer. Think of Google as a huge library, containing the overall sum of human knowledge. It didn’t always start that way. It reminds me of the adventurers and explorers from around the world who brought their works to the famous city of Alexandria; the library collected writings, science journals, data, and more with the overall intention to preserve this knowledge and serve as a method for distributing it to the local community, and eventually the world.

Google sends out adventurers of its own, or “web crawlers,” to look for websites to scan and add to the index. Using those key words can be crucial in driving traffic to your website, and subsequently putting sales in your book. If you run a plumbing company in Charlotte, and frequently post updates about your services, Google will start to associate you with the people searching for a solution to their busted pipes.

Plumber search trends over a four month period in Charlotte, NC

Additionally, there are ways that creating links on your website to other sources can have an impact on your search rankings. It turns outs that sharing with the community and engaging with your audience can yield positive returns. Not only that, but linking to your social media helps to shape your web presence, and might offer additional opportunities to top the search rankings, and beat your competition for the attention of a customer.

There’s a technical aspect to SEO as well. Your small business needs to be sure it is optimized for mobile devices. In April of 2015, Google announced that search engine results would be impacted by how mobile-friendly that a website is. Considering that there are over 1.5 billion mobile device users around the world, it is clear that anyone running a business in the 21st century needs to be optimized to support all users.

SEO relies on a number of factors

While SEO is crucial to building a successful customer following and staying connected to an ever-growing web-based market, there are a few downsides to managing this. The first is that it can often take time to build up your presence. Google takes into consideration factors such as the age of your domain, your geographic location, how often you post, and more. Typically there is a window of 4-6 months before it can start accumulating returns.

The second main problem is that SEO is simply a time consuming task. It’s an ongoing project requiring constant research, and staying up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry. Some business owners have turned to hiring guest bloggers to assist them, and have claimed it to be helpful. Fortunately, there are short term solutions that can assist in the interim, and which may actually help boost SEO even more. In Part Two, I’ll discuss short-term solutions that can drive traffic to your website while you build out your platform.

-Mitchell S