The Strategic Guide to SEO: Boosting Your Firm’s Online Visibility
By: Christine Hollinden, Partner at Hollinden | MBA, CPSM, CEPA, CM&AA
Referrals are often the first step in securing new business, but have you ever considered how prospects ultimately decide whom to hire? Typically, they start by consulting their network and then turn to online searches for additional information—or they search first and look for familiar names. Either way, a search is almost always part of the decision-making process. If they can’t find your firm, they may quickly move on to a competitor who appears in their search results. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play, making it essential for success in today’s competitive marketplace.
What if you don’t have the time or are simply not interested in learning how to implement SEO? Don’t worry, we’re here to help you understand what you need to know about SEO, its benefits, and how you can strategically grow your business.
Why SEO?
For the first 15 years, Google made only minor adjustments to its algorithm regarding the online user experience. Today, though, there are roughly nine updates each day. Some of these changes are subtle, targeting loopholes that inflate rankings or address spam, while others, like the bigger updates in August 2024, focus on promoting high-quality, valuable content and pushing lower-quality material out the door. To maintain or improve your rankings, SEO must be a core component of your firm’s growth strategy, and it requires a consistent effort to maintain, which may not be what your business can afford in-house.
While that may be the case, there are too many benefits of SEO to ignore. Here are just some of the benefits of adding SEO into your business strategy and how it can help your business thrive in 2024 and beyond.
It Drives More Business to Your Firm
SEO has been proven by multiple marketers to drive more business to those who integrate it into their operations. In fact, 60% of marketers claim SEO is their most effective way to generate quality leads.
It Generates More Revenue
SEO is not just a way to get in front of more clients. Businesses that invest in SEO specialists have reported an average ROI of 300%, making SEO a highly effective method for boosting your bottom line.
It Can Save You Money
Not only can SEO boost your revenue, but it can help you save money in the long run. In 2023, roughly 88% of marketers who used SEO planned to invest in additional SEO support due to its effectiveness.
What Can You Do to Reap the Rewards of SEO?
Benchmark the Current Status of Your Website and Industry
Understanding the current state of your industry and website can improve the resilience of your business among competitors, but accomplishing this is easier said than done. Some considerations to look into are:
- Reports from Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) to get data on organic results of traffic, clicks, rankings, and average positioning.
- SEO tools designed to identify keyword gaps and other areas of opportunity to boost your business
- Google’s algorithms and how they function
For instance, Google’s algorithms are focused on returning results relevant to your search. It uses search history, geographic location, IP address, frequently visited sites, the Google account, browser, and other factors to return the most relevant results for you. That means searching key terms from your work computer to determine where your firm ranks may not be accurate. However, in addition to the GA and GSC reports, firms like Hollinden turn to professional-level tools such as Moz, SEMRush, Screaming Frog, and AHREFs to assess your site’s performance, indexability, authority score, backlinks, and other relevant metrics.
Identify Gaps in Keywords
After understanding the state of your website and competitors, you should aim to identify any keyword gaps, which includes the following steps:
- Make a list of the current keywords and rankings.
- Rank the importance of keywords to identify those most relevant, as well as any outdated or irrelevant terms.
- Create a list of key terms, including individuals’ names, that prospects would use to search for your firm, services, and partners.
- Review how competitors rank for the key terms.
- Identify the gaps.
By pinpointing these gaps, you can target specific keywords that resonate with your audience, optimize your content to address unmet needs, and improve your search engine rankings. This approach not only enhances your online visibility but also ensures that your efforts are aligned with the evolving search behavior of your target market.
Optimize Your Foundational SEO Elements
SEO is a rabbit hole that you’ll find yourself burrowing deeper and deeper down. That’s why we suggest addressing your foundational SEO elements as one of the first steps of implementing SEO. Across your website, your indexed pages must have proper title tags, meta descriptions, H1 Headers, URL structure, and alt tags to get in front of the most eyeballs. While that may seem simple, there is more complexity to the process than it seems. Title tags and meta descriptions, for example, must meet the necessary length requirements of search engines in terms of characters. They must also accurately reflect the content on that page, include keywords, but not too many keywords, as that can lead to an issue called “keyword stuffing.”
Segment and Personalize Content
Not all content is of equal importance when it comes to SEO Content types may include blog post (long-form or short form), video, podcast, or pillar page. What you must do is identify and organize all the content on your website. Hollinden typically does this in spreadsheet with columns for the title, URL, content type, and next steps. For example, a pillar page is a central or cornerstone topic that can have branches of other relevant topics. Think of it like a core topic and the other subtopics can connect back to that core topic. With a pillar page, you may write an overview of how the M&A process works. Topic clusters may delve deeper into the complexities of the M&A process, such as “how to prepare your company for sale,” “why certain companies draw higher multiples,” and so on.
Ready to Grow with a Marketing Agency That Specializes in SEO?
Results-driven SEO starts with strategy tied to goals, and creating and implementing a strategic approach takes more than just knowing the basics. If this seems like a lot to tackle, well, that’s because it is! But that doesn’t mean you can’t receive the benefits of SEO. You just need the right help to do so, and Hollinden is here to help with your business strategy needs.
If you’re curious about how your firm currently ranks and what it can do to grow strategically, Hollinden offers a complimentary baseline SEO audit to help you assess your position and identify opportunities for improvement.
Visit our website today to learn more!
