What is SEO?
November 27, 2020
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Your website is a business card. You just need to hand it out. Table of Contents So you had a website built. Great. Now what?
Lead Generation
Your website is a business card. You just need to hand it out.
Table of Contents
So you had a website built. Great. Now what?
It’s all well and good until you consider that there are over 2 BILLION websites on the internet. “Only” 400 million or so of those are considered active, and the rest…well the rest sit in a pile, unindexed and forgotten.
Unfortunately, the whole concept of “if you build it, they will come” is largely a myth, unless your product or offering is so extremely specific that you have almost no competition.
So many website owners spend huge money on sites hosted on drag and drop site builders and get told by their IT people that all they need is a nice-looking web page with some fancy “dynamic widgets and analytics” and everything else will just work out.
That’s like telling a builder to build the shell of a house on top of a cardboard box, throw in some nice-looking windows and then leave the rest, because eventually, the plumbing and flooring and drywall and siding and ___ will magically happen and ‘just work out’.
We’d like to meet that guy and get some tips from him!
And yet sadly, that’s the approach of so very many businesses:
Basically all you have at this point is a fancy business card and no way to hand it out or even get noticed.
How do I get my website noticed?
In order for your website to not get lost amid the noise, you have two options:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the art of refining the look, feel, and relevance of your website both internally and externally. This increases the quantity and quality of traffic to your site through organic search results.
- Digital Advertising, which is the process of publishing promotional material through online platforms such as social media, search engines, advertising platforms, and various other examples of your product that can be accessed digitally.
Consumers are spending a large part of their time every day on the Internet, and we have come to the point where the internet reaches into the physical world around you (think digital billboards for instance).
But my nephew told me I can get this SEO thing done on Fiverr.com for like $100.
This is the next biggest issue. You know you should invest in SEO, but where should you go to acquire that service? Your business sense is telling you it’s a nearly invisible investment so you look for the cheapest alternative. One problem: You know who’s in the SEO space right now?
Everyone.
The market is so saturated with fly-by-night search engine optimization providers, they’re all forced to compete against each other to make a buck. They all basically read from the same outdated list of action items to work on to ‘help it rank’. We’re talking about your standards:
- Overuse of meta tags
- Non-contextual backlinking
- Keyword stuffing your titles, images, and pages
- Heavy use of anchor text on internal links
- Article spinning
- Web pages for every variant you’d like to rank for
- Mass directory submission
- Long exact-match keyword domains
- Incorrectly interpreting keyword competition cost as relevant
- Comment spamming for backlinks
…and on and on. What most of them don’t understand is this: it’s not 2005 anymore. Search engine algorithms make use of extraordinarily perceptive AI filtering to judge how useful or spammy your site is, and grant ranking at the top accordingly!
So how do I rank my website in 2021 and beyond?
Great question!
SEO modeling has changed, even markedly in 2020 alone. That said, there are certain benchmarks that have stood the test of time, and in the current world of cognitive SEO the four most important are Relevance, User Experience, Authority, and Contextual Optimization.
Think about SEO like this: It’s Thanksgiving, and you really want a good recipe for pumpkin spiced latte. So you pop over to a search engine, and type “pumpkin spice latte” and hit enter.
You’re going to get an organic results page that looks similar to the following:
The takeaway here is that out of almost 20 million web pages and 40,500 searches a month for Pumpkin Spice Latte, Google has displayed the websites above using several levels of analysis and filtration:
- Based on the vernacular, timing, and spelling of your search, its algorithm has decided that you almost certainly meant to find a recipe, not a description for Pumpkin Spiced Latte.
- It has made the intelligent assumption that you will likely click on one of the top 3 images to follow it to the recipe, based in part on yours and other sites’ historical tracking data.
- It has given contextual weight to specific sites in its index that are far more relevant to your search and have a better user experience to offer than others, so it served up the top sites it found that fit the majority of the criteria for this search
These three factors are influenced by Contextual Search Engine Optimization. - Combined with contextual relevance, it has also taken into account specific optimizations on (or in relation to) those sites that allow it to display certain data related to your search.
This factor is influenced by On-site, Off-site, and Technical Search Engine Optimization.
- Depending on your market or product, the search engine might display your product due to your business’s geographic location in addition to the other factors above.
This factor is influenced by Local Search Engine Optimization.
What this means to you, the website owner is this: It’s not just enough to put up a site and hope for the best any more. You need to be extraordinarily clear with your offer, your content, and the behind the scenes data and site structure optimization that is required for your site to rank high in search.
Website Relevance – Explained
Think about it this way. If you run a company selling a service such as accounting, and your website is full of information about your accounting firm but also about your side business selling frozen yoghurt machines, you are running a contextually irrelevant website.
In the world of short attention spans, you have 3 seconds to grab and keep attention. But what is your audience looking for? Accounting? Yoghurt machines? Pilot hats? You can see where the message becomes garbled for lack of focus.
How is a search engine supposed to categorize your offering so it can serve it up to the most relevant audience?
It can’t.
This is why a site like this would be lucky to even be on page 50 of the search results. There are literally thousands of other sites for that audience that would be better suited to their search, so you are left in the dust.
This leads us to the next benchmark, User Experience.
How Can I Improve My Website’s User Experience?
Any solid SEO strategy will partially focus on your website’s User Experience. This is a simple concept, but easy to screw up. Here are some tips for a better user experience:
- The purpose of your website should be immediately apparent when it loads up.
- You should have minimal distractions on your pages so as to keep your visitors focused on your site’s main purpose.
- Your site should flow smoothly, with coordinated colors and styles.
- Don’t use popups, timers, gifs, or any other things that would give your visitors cause to be annoyed by your site.
- Remember that your site is a business card, and the impression your users get when they see it is the impression that will color all of their transactions with you!
In a very abbreviated nutshell, it simply means:
How much of your website content is relevant to the type or desires of the audience you’d like to reach?
Taking that thought another step further:
How much of your content is helpful to your audience instead of promotional?
#Contentmarketing is educational, not promotional, says @MicheleLinn. https://t.co/XIdIR28ozd
— BlackValve Analytics (@BlackvalveA) November 26, 2020
This kind of content on your site makes a 100% difference to the weight which a search engine like Google will give to your content. The more helpful and RELEVANT it is to your audience, the better your rankings will be.
Who is BlackValve Analytics?
BlackValve Analytics was born out of the desire to help the average business owner bring their offering to the public, without the exorbitant costs associated with your standard agency contracts. We don’t charge retainer fees. You don’t have to wake up at night and wonder if the $5k you spent this month is going to waste or not. We provide our customers service in 3 areas:Lead Generation
We leverage or create traffic flow to your website using unique marketing, and intelligently filter interest to bring you high quality leads, already primed and much more likely to purchase from you.
All you need to be concerned about is converting those quality leads to a sale, and
Search Engine Optimization
We don’t use guesswork to rank our clients’ sites. Ever.
Instead we adhere to a consistent, proven, and highly scientific methodology based purely on an intelligent interpretation of the data from your site to achieve ranking.
Digital Marketing
Your offers are only as good as the impressions you leave with people! Because of our strategic partnerships with some of the best media creators in the market, we are able to offer our clients an amazing array of media possibilities that would normally only be available to much larger clients!
Coupled with our in-house ads wizards, this packs an insanely powerful punch for your message.
What is Local SEO?
November 16, 2020
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Every small or multi-location company can grow their business and attract more customers using local SEO strategies. In this guide we explain what local search
