My Previous Online Marketing Disaster
Nearly ten years ago I made the decision to start a new business. My initial idea was to develop a series of finance courses and sell them online, and I was really excited about this because I thought it had the potential to be a very scalable business.
I put weeks of effort into incorporating my company, designing a logo, and (most importantly) developing my curriculum, putting together lots of pretty PowerPoint slides for each course, and recording the audio content. I purchased a subscription for an online learning management system (LMS) with e-commerce functionality, got everything set up, hit the “publish” button and then eagerly waited for the expected hordes of customers to start handing me their money.
What happened instead? Crickets.
If You Build It, They Will Come… Or Will They?
This was my Kevin Costner moment (a reference to his iconic Field of Dreams movie), except that I built my baseball diamond (my online courses website) in the middle of the cornfield (the internet), and the baseball players (my potential customers) failed to show up.
Looking back on this now, I can clearly see that I was completely naïve about finding clients for my fledgling online business, because I assumed that lots of people would find me online. What I failed to account for though was how specifically that was supposed to happen.
Sure, people could easily find my website if they did a Google search for my company name. But how is some random person going to know to search for that? Wouldn’t someone search for something along the lines of “online personal finance courses” instead?
And this is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about. First, we need to figure out what your potential customers are searching for (sometimes referred to as search intent). Next, we need to ensure that your website aligns with that intent as much as possible.
Blogging Will Improve Your Online Visibility… Or Will It?
The next logical step for many small business owners who are seeking to attract more visitors to their website is often to add a blog. Why? Because someone told them about blogging, or they read somewhere online about some blogs being so successful that they even have ads plastered all over them, or maybe it’s because their website has a CMS and it’s going to waste if it’s not being used.
And just to confuse things a bit, there is potentially more than one reason for your organization to consider having a blog. Publishing articles on your website can be a great way to demonstrate expertise. It can also be used to share information about how great your company’s culture is, such as your employees volunteering for a local non-profit organization, or that awesome summer BBQ last week when your management team personally grilled up some super yummy food for your valued employees.
What usually gets missed though is that you need to be very intentional from an SEO perspective if you’re posting an article to generate clicks. Your target keywords matter (more on this below). Your title matters. Your headings matter. Your “behind-the-curtains” meta description matters.
I’ve seen some websites with an absolutely fantastic collection of blog posts which are great for establishing your credibility if someone actually manages to find you online, but that are also unfortunately doing nothing to help with getting noticed online.
This Is the Way: A Data-Driven SEO Approach
What is SEO, and why is a data-driven SEO strategy so important for helping your business to get noticed online?
I would personally define SEO as being an intentional, multi-faceted, data-driven approach for increasing the probability that your website content not only shows up in the Google search results, but that it also ranks highly within that list of search results.
For example, a crucial part of SEO involves researching which keywords to target with your website content. Keywords are basically the individual words and groups of words (e.g., central air conditioning, dog washing station, etc.) that your potential customers are punching into a Google search when they’re trying to find your products or services.
Another super important part of SEO is collecting data from a variety of sources, and then using that data to inform your SEO strategy. How many visitors is your website getting each month? Where did those visits originate from, such as online searches or social media? Which pages within your website are those visitors landing on? Which keywords are your website ranking for, and which keywords is your site failing to rank for?
Someone also needs to be responsible for ensuring that all of those small details that I mentioned earlier, such as page titles and headings, are configured properly, so that search engines are able to properly “understand” what your content is about.
There are plenty of free resources available online for learning SEO, and much of it is surprisingly simple to implement, but just like it’s easiest for me to call a plumber to fix my kitchen sink drain pipes, it’s also easiest to hire an experienced SEO consultant to improve your online visibility.
At Least One of Your Competitors Is Benefiting from SEO
Unlike some of my competitors, all of my SEO audits include a competitive analysis component, which typically includes at least five key competitors.
After completing the initial competitive analysis, what I usually see is that one or two of my client’s competitors are performing very well from an SEO perspective, so much so that they were either extremely lucky or they clearly had an SEO expert helping them out with their overall website strategy at some point in time.
The other interesting thing is that there are typically a number of competitors that have extremely poor online visibility, with very low estimated organic traffic to their website.
This is actually an ideal scenario for my client, because it means that there is at least one competitor that they can aspire to be more like (i.e., performing well in online search results), and there are also multiple competitors that the client should be able to easily outperform if they hire me to help them out with their SEO strategy.
Conclusion
Ultimately, you basically have two options for trying to attract more customers.
The first option is to hope that they will somehow find you amongst millions of other websites. The second option is to remember that hope is not a strategy, and to leverage SEO to tilt the scale in your favour.
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About the Author
John is a multi-disciplinary professional who has spent twenty years mastering the intersection of business, finance, and information technology. His technical journey began with building and repairing computers, a foundation that led to him being recruited by a pioneering video alarm monitoring startup as a network administrator and web developer. He subsequently attended the University of Alberta, discovering a passion for finance while completing his Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he later became a CFA charterholder.
He has over a decade of experience in the finance industry, including roles with Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, a highly successful private lender, and a boutique private equity firm. John also previously owned and operated a dedicated IT consulting practice, and he was the sole web developer for an online media company that he co-founded.