8. This is one of 6 areas that will effect your success: Referral Safeguard® Branding: Targeted Lead Generation Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Social Media Reputation Management Fulfillment: Leads: Traffic:
Welcome to E-Marketing for Service Leaders – SEO (Part 1 of 6), by Consumer IQ a leader in accountability in financial services.
In the next 15 minutes, we are going to dive into the concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how the true balance is between finding both Online Relevance as well as Projecting the Appropriate Corporate Image. We will also close with what you can do to protect yourself from expensive bills related to this service as it’s a complicated concept and easy to sell for those interested in what can be perceived as a way to get leads in the door.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the DNA of your website. More specifically how your website is put together from a technical perspective that the programs and algorithms of search engines can read and understand. The understanding of what is on your site , not visual, standpoint. The composition of these different attributes will either help or hide the relevance of your carefully created online identity. This refers to Organic or Free placement, but lets not use free because we all know this effort costs a lot of money and time to achieve..
The reason SEO gets complicated is both a consumer issue and a web-developer issue. First of all, the initial costs to become relevant online aren’t small, there is a lot of time that should be placed into establishing the appropriate identity, look, and feel. It’s normally within the follow-up where the program may lose it’s luster and that is due to the Search Engines Constantly changing the criteria (DNA) that they see as important to ensure they provide their users with the most credible search results. As an example, Google changes the components of it’s search relevance algorithms as much as 500x a year. There is also the fact that as more consumers are turning to the internet, more resources pop up that get viral, so it’s important to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.
Keywords – those of your company as well as those of your competitors Site Layout – it’s easy to go over the top, Choose your navigation carefully as well as your parent & child taxonomy Coding – this is mainly for the specialists, but setup here is critical to help give the boost you need as well as to maintain relevance beyond the next few months Copy – This ties it all together to not only work on SEO, but into the next step of SEM
There are a lot of different opinions about what works and what doesn’t work and more often than not they revolve around the same core principals that we have already addressed. We have found that by paying attention to the core principals, which are easier to control and manage, you can stay relevant beyond the time and money spent on the setup.
As your SEO work begins to take hold and is introduced to the online engines, you will move to the top 10 % of Relevance for the specific keywords you have targeted for your company. That improved relevance, or organic placement, will increase the amount of eyes that see your links otherwise known as Impressions, and as we all know the more impressions you have, the more opportunities there will be for introductions or Clickthroughs to your website.
To visualize the system in another way, it’s easy to see that all the different components used to generate the desired results can take a lot of time out of your day. Outside of the fact that we have automated all these resources in a single system, the unique use of web-based technologies guarantees that our product is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ensuring our members are always at the right place at the right time.
Consumer IQ is a specialty branding and marketing company with a niche focus on the financial services industry. We have membership options and packages for individuals as well as larger institutional accounts. Schedule a consultation today!