On November 7, 2020, former New York mayor and Donald Trump associate Rudy Giuliani stood outside of a landscaping company on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, delivering an impassioned speech in front of a wall adorned with “Trump 2020” signs in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
We all know this story, and now we even know the company Giuliani accidentally plugged: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
So, why was Giuliani at a small landscaping company a few miles away from Philadelphia’s urban core? The answer probably had something to do with SEO, and searching “Four Seasons Philadelphia,” to deliver a speech for a man known for his connection to high-end hotels.
SEO is a necessary part of doing business in this day and age. The way companies spread the word about themselves is different. TV ads, print ads, and even radio ads are still around, but they’re not the start and end. Even if you’re advertising on the web, on a podcast, or on TV, it typically comes with a call-to-action to find your business online. And, with that, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers and would-be customers to find you.
No one wants to scroll through 10 pages of Google results to find your business – or worse, accidentally associate themselves with a similarly-named competitor.
Before You Start
Before you worry about tweaking your SEO, make sure you’ve laid the correct foundation of SEO first. It’s sort of like car maintenance: You can’t open up the hood and tweak anything if you don’t even have the car in the first place.
One of the very first things that you should do, whether it’s for your business or for a site that specializes in content, is to make sure that the website is being indexed by search engines like Google.
If not, you could be going through the necessary motions and doing everything right from an SEO best practices standpoint, but it won’t make a difference.
To make sure your site is being indexed, you can go to any major search engine and write the URL in the search bar, and make sure the site is showing up. If it is, you’re good! Congratulations.
If not, it means you have to submit the website to search consoles. Each major search engine like Google or Bing has their own.
Know Your Audience
SEO optimization, in practice, is just tailoring your online experience to appeal to the most people. It’s a little morbid, but think of it like setting a trap. You wouldn’t set a mouse trap with something that a mouse doesn’t eat, or put it in a place a mouse doesn’t go, right? No. You load it with cheese and put it on the floor.
For business owners and content creators, you need to know what sorts of things your customers and clients are searching, and make sure your site is what shows up when they do.
Using tools like Google Search Trends, or another free tool to see what people are typing in relation to certain topics, can provide insight into what the audiences are doing online, and you can best position yourself from there.
To use Google as the example again, you can get a “Query report,” or type your domain in on these platforms and see what keywords are ranking, so you can get a sense of your audience’s behavior from there.
If you don’t look at the actual keywords and searches, you’re just guessing, and you could be optimizing all of the wrong things, once again making yourself invisible and doing a lot of work in the process that doesn’t yield any (or as many) results.
Get Social
I know we all try to limit our distractions, and that often means putting the phone away to avoid getting sucked into an Instagram loop or losing hours to scrolling Twitter, but social media plays a huge role in SEO. Remember, it’s called social “networking” for a good reason!
And in recent history, it seems like hashtags have sort of lost their intended use, but hashtags are really handy ways to lump content together based on a topic. This can be tied into an ongoing event, a topic of a piece of content, or a major facet of
a business.
Think #promotionalproducts, or #appareldecoration, or a specific event you’re a part of. These are a lot more useful than using hashtags as punctuation for a post, like #sorrynotsorry or forcing some long-winded joke that no one is ever going to click.
Instead, when they click on #apparelembroidery, they’ll see content specifically about apparel embroidery. If your posts are using that hashtag, a potential customer would see the many videos showing off your embroidery capabilities and check you out. If your company links are listed on your social media platforms, that creates a smooth connection from customer to business.
Be Yourself
In the age of AI, it’s also easy to rely on revolutionary text-generation programs like ChatGPT. But, it’s crucial to remember that these programs only create text and images based on existing text and images. That means, whatever you prompt ChatGPT to make, it is “pulling” from existing content, meaning anything you post could share characteristics with other sites.
Taking the time to create something wholly original and in your own unique voice strengthens not only your brand identity, but also your odds of better SEO.
Even if you’re not using AI, taking other mass-produced content could result in Google “ignoring” the page and not indexing them, since it can detect that the content is used on other sites.
Analyzing The Data
So, once you’ve done all this, how do you know for sure that you’re on the right track? Well, luckily, you have tools at your disposal to accurately quantify your SEO reach.
Gloria LaFont, president of Action Marketing, specializes in SEO and branding for promotional products distributors specifically.
In a piece from last year, explaining the ins and outs of SEO specifically for print and promotional products distributors, LaFont laid out some of the key metrics to measure.
She listed number of monthly visitors; number of form submissions, calls, and chats bounce rate (i.e. the number of people leaving your site without visiting another page); number of pages visited; traffic sources (i.e. where the people came from); sessions; devices; page views, unique page views, and engagement; average time spent on pages; and exit pages.
To ensure that the right people are viewing your site, you can take a look at metrics such as inquiries per month, unqualified versus qualified leads, and number of sales. That way, you can deduce whether the audience you draw is an audience that makes a difference in your business.
It’s a bit like owning a restaurant, and advertising for a lot of people to come look at the artwork on the wall, but none of them order food. It’s all well and good that people come in the door, but unless they’re buying what you’re selling, all of that work was really for nothing.
Business owners need to be sure that the content they’re creating, and the keywords they use to advertise their content and pages, are reaching the right people using strategic titles in content pieces, hashtags when applicable, and being sure that your page comes up when certain search terms are used.
The Bottom Line
Optimizing your business for the web is no longer negotiable. You’re putting billboards up on the information super highway, to use a semi-antiquated term. We all do business online, whether we’re the consumer or the seller. So, since you’re going to be doing it anyway, you need to make sure your labor is yielding the appropriate results.
Take the necessary steps to ensure that your business is easy to find. It’s like the quote from “Field of Dreams.” If you build it, they will come. But, what the ghost of that baseball player or whatever (it’s been a while sine we’ve seen it) left out is that you have to give your business the tools to be found.
Building it isn’t enough anymore.
