If your business sells big ticket items or services, there’s a good chance that you have a salesperson, or several. These professionals need to have the skills to close new business, or they drain resources. If you want SEO to work for your sales-driven business, good closers are needed for the website-generated leads.

The Advantage of Being Proactive

Every time a sale is made, especially to a new customer, a familiar dance takes place. It always begins with a first conversation. Whichever way that first conversation originates, whether SEO or other referral, the skilled salesperson begins uncovering real needs and determines if he or she can be of value. And so, the dance begins. As buyer and seller engage in discussion, trust is established, and new business is transacted.

Of course, for eCommerce businesses, SEO-generated leads (real people) need to find what they’re looking for. Landing pages, CTAs, store and shopping cart experiences must be clear, easy and rewarding. Essentially, the website needs to close the deal.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Many, many businesses require a person-to-person conversation before any transaction will take place. Is yours one of them? Here’s where sales and search marketing need to work in concert. When a chat is initiated, a request form is filled out, or a phone call comes in, the skilled sales or customer service person will quickly determine if this lead is a good fit. What kinds of questions do you have ready to qualify good customers from those who are not a fit?

Far be it from sales training, the focus here is on realizing how far SEO can go for certain kinds of businesses. For some, it can be a drain of time and precious marketing dollars with only marginal results. For others, it is the lifeblood of sustainable growth.

The Closer

If you want your SEO efforts to work, it’s vital to deliver a great website experience! Great landing pages can make a great deal of impact on your SEO or search marketing campaign (“great” is repeated on purpose). If your website design and landing pages are lame, so will be your SEO results. You might gain traffic, but what do visitors get when they click your ad?

• Do you know how to design and set up a targeted landing page that coverts visitors to leads?
• Do you know how to qualify, build relationships and win new business from those inbound leads?

If you answer yes to those questions, SEO and Search Engine Marketing might be good options to help your business grow and thrive.

Should you decide to pursue a targeted digital marketing strategy, work with someone who will thoroughly and honestly examine the pros and cons with you. SEO or paid search ads could be a great opportunity if you haven’t delved into them yet.

The post The Only Way SEO Works for B2B appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enables your website content to be given situational context, then indexed and ranked in authority for searchers of information. I think we all know that.

But did you know…

“Prioritizing valuable content is the key ingredient to success… creating high-quality, informative content that is genuinely useful to the audience should be the priority. When content is valuable, it naturally attracts links and engagement, which ultimately boosts its search engine rankings.” -Darryl Navarrete, CEO, marketing director and SEO specialist.

Keywords or Key Information?

Keyword research is still important for understanding how people search for content in different categories, but intentional keyword stuffing is a dead practice that deserves the grave. How many times do you want to see “in New Hampshire” (or some other geo target) repeated when you read about a product or service? It doesn’t matter where you use it, and the qualification sounds silly.

The takeaway: Repetition and redundancy are enemies of SEO in 2023! Keywords should be used like strong seasoning – in the right amounts and in just the right places.

Each page on your website should have a keyword strategy. Title tags, slugs, meta descriptions and on-page content should all contain the targeted keyword (or phrase) that your audience members are using to find pertinent information. Keyword research can help here. However, be very careful about forcing keywords into your website content. Make sure they flow in naturally as in an engaging conversation.

Today’s SEO is based on natural language, contextual meaning, and quality of information so it doesn’t matter if you use more industry keywords than your competitors. If your content is well organized and more valuable to the visitors, you’ll have the SEO advantage.

The Coveted Google Page One Results

Getting on the first page of Google for keyword searches is still widely misunderstood. Page one organic search results are fiercely fought for and earned.

Unfortunately, some small business owners and marketing directors are under the impression that because they do good work and have a website designer, their business “should be” showing up on page one in Google for keyword searches. In most cases, those who make it “above the fold” have worked years to get there. They’ve invested in their businesses by building excellent, comprehensive, and valuable websites that visitors use and share with others. Maybe you’re one of them enjoying the results today.

The Reality Check with Good News

If you’re looking to improve website search results, don’t fall for the smoke and mirrors that have confused business owners and marketing directors for decades. We who understand this business, and are honest about it, are constantly fighting the false notions of which clients have been misinformed.

Everyone thinks their business has what it takes to get visible Google search results. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t.

If you do want immediate results, you can pay for inbound leads with a pay per click campaign. This gives you the advantage of fast conversions and helps you gain valuable search engine data you can apply organically.  And remember, your landing pages must be relevant and valuable to visitors, so content quality is ever important with paid campaigns.

If you want to succeed in organic SEO, know what it takes. With some care and focus on building out valuable content using a simple and focused keyword strategy, you can get better results in a matter of months or even just weeks.

To sum it all up, companies with enduring success in digital marketing “make money the old-fashioned way, they earn it!”

The post Know Your SEO in 2023 appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

When you understand the pitfalls, paid search can boost web traffic and sales very quickly when properly executed. In the world of paid online advertising, you need to understand the Google platform and this is best reserved for specialists. It also takes a significant ad budget to generate enough clicks to make paid search pay off.

Great SEO Results – Naturally

But today we’re focusing on Organic SEO, that is unpaid, high internet search engine optimization results based on the structure and content of your website. The good news is, your website can rank and perform highly in search engines if you simply do a good job with your website development and content quality as well as keep it maintained!

Many businesses are in a position to forego the high cost of a Google Ads campaign if they don’t need to push results immediately but instead want to grow their inbound leads and sales results over time. With a little patience and conscientious website development & maintenance, Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. will start to visibly deliver your website to people searching your site’s keywords and phrases. This process may only take several months or a year to start showing impressive results!

Your site’s organic ranking will get higher and higher as your content quality improves and more people reach your site through searches and link referrals.

Content Relevancy and User Experience

The ticket to high organic search engine ranking is the situational and contextual relevancy of your site’s content to an established industry or the specific needs of a target market. Another critical factor is the quality of user experience (UX). The time people spend on your website; how they interact with it and download information can affect search ranking considerably.

Ask yourself these crucial UX questions: Do people who search for your product & service expertise get rewarded when they land on your website? Just how authoritative is your site’s content when judged by an objective marketplace? How well do your competitors’ sites stack up against yours? Are you envious of competition websites? How current is your information? How quickly do you respond to the market with updated content about technology changes or new trends? Do you have an active blog with videos, downloadable content and easy contact forms?

You know what the answers to the above questions should be. All you need is some focused dedication and your website will generate the inbound leads your company needs to keep growing.

High organic search engine performance is reserved for the businesses that take their websites seriously and continually maintain them. It’s really that simple.

The post Organic SEO in 2018 appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Forget your friends’ advice. Just Google it!

Do you need a certain product or service about which you know little? If so, Google wants you to ignore your friends and pay attention to their search engine instead.

When it comes to seeking referrals, do your friends have the best resources to help you find what you need? In many cases, yes, in other cases, maybe and in still others, no! When your friends and family come up dry, there’s one place to go; the Internet.

Let the numbers work for you!

Chances are, most of your friends and associates don’t have the right experience or enough knowledge about your industry to make fully informed referrals. It’s even more likely that your current customers and friends don’t associate with enough prospective clients to feed you enough referrals to sustain and grow your business.

Person to person word of mouth still has a lot of business influence but in a hyper-competitive, digitally enabled marketplace like we have today, you need a strong internet search presence to validate verbal claims by individuals. Even if you get a good personal referral, your prospect will go online to check you out before calling. You can be sure they’ll Google you first. What shows up when they do? This is the simplest and one of the best SEO tests you can do.

Google yourself now!

Go ahead, Google yourself! What’s in the first few positions on the first page? Is it your content or someone else’s who shares a name? Is your own website or LinkedIn Profile in one of the top positions? If you do show up on the first page, is the information favorable and complimentary or could it raise questions about how well positioned you are in your industry?

Creating a favorable and growth-oriented presence that is searchable on the Internet is a sustainability imperative today, even if you’re still chugging along on word of mouth. At some point soon, if not already, the default action of most people will be “I’ll just Google it…” instead of “I’ll just ask Larry…”

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The evolution of organic SEO is a case study in self-regulating integrity. It has taken approximately 20 years for Google to figure out what sites are authentic and authoritative, which ones are mediocre or minimally acceptable and which are just “spam.” And believe, me, they know!

Bogus gets the boot!

Guess what Google focuses on when determining your website’s ranking? Your actual industry knowledge, the depth and veracity of your site’s content, the visitors’ user experiences, visitor interactions, shared links and referrals. Should you ever speak with someone who professes to be an “SEO expert,” and they begin confusing you with a lot of technical jargon, walk away. If instead, they discuss robust content development and ways to improve user experience, then it would be worth having a conversation with them.

In 2017, the bottom line for organic search is this: If you want good organic SEO results, you need to work hard to make sure your web content is valuable, dynamic and comprehensive for visitors. That takes creative brainpower and has nothing to do with technology.

In recent years a lot of companies wasted a lot of money on SEO services that may have shown early results but then worked against them because of “black hat” tactics such as keyword stuffing. Too much effort was expended trying to court Google (or fake them out) based on keyword and metadata veneer with little or no substance behind it. Now, you better make sure there’s valuable substance to your content and that it’s as deep as you can make it.

You know where to spend your time. Where should you spend your money?

Are you considering a search engine marketing campaign and budget? Good! Because today we have more definitive ways to drive search engine results. Any reputable web designer should build your website properly so that it’s “search engine friendly.” In 2017 this should be a given! The point is, don’t worry about the technical side of SEO or put any real money into it.

If you’re going to spend money on organic search, start with a writer who understands your industry or else pay yourself to do it (spend your own company’s manhours). The best place to put your money is exactly where Google wants you to spend it – in a Google Adwords campaign. Paid search marketing will deliver immediate results and give you extremely valuable data to keep improving the results, not only of your paid campaigns but also your organic website content, further boosting your organic SEO efforts. See the synergy?

The Old One-Two Punch

So, now you have a clear route to search engine optimization and marketing success in 2017. Spend time on content and (gulp) money on advertising! You need to be proactive on both fronts: quality web content and targeted pay-per-click advertising with a set budget that you control. You only pay for actual results – real world search clicks to your website. When those legitimate searchers land on your website, the content better darn well deliver what they want! Then you’ll be firing on all cylinders.

The post SEO 2017: Where to spend time and where to spend money appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Google gets bored and turns away from old content just like you do. That’s why their spiders or “bots” are always out crawling through websites, including yours, looking for the latest relevant information that their consumers (most people) are seeking.

What’s new? When you ask that simple question, you really do want to know the answer because what’s old is irrelevant. Is there anything less interesting than old news; stuff you seen and heard before?

Frequently updating website content tells the search engines that you are at least an active publisher of information. The more relevant the information is to your business category, and the more valuable it is to your target audience, the better Google and other search engines will rank your pages organically. Provided that your website is coded well enough, quality content is pure SEO gold.

The more often you add fresh, high quality information to your website, the more Google’s crawlers will come back around to see what’s new. As that new content is determined to be relevant and valuable to searchers, Google will index it and raise your pages’ visibility. They are looking for authoritative sites that will deliver the right information to the searcher. Freshness and frequency combined with relevance and quality build authoritative status into your website. Again, this is SEO gold!

Effective SEO is not complicated but it’s extremely competitive. Maybe we should just leave it at that.

The post Entertain Google! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The inbound marketing model is working well for the companies that have discovered the successful formula. The formula works in B2B as well if not better than in B2C markets.

The first question that comes up is what do we talk about? The simplest answer is anything that might come up in a business conversation with customers and suppliers in your industry. In most industries, that covers a wide range of topics!

Offering favorite family recipes in your newsletters is nice but what can you offer that’s valuable to the recipient and relevant to the business? If readers like the recipes, go ahead and include them – along with the valuable business information your readers can use; compelling material that keeps your brand relevant to them.

There are many more questions to answer. What topics are interesting to people? Are there experts available to interview? What about using video and audio podcasts versus the written word? What about mailing lists, frequency, social media and web integration?

Perhaps the most important question is, how do I plan, develop and implement a successful content driven (inbound) marketing strategy?

Okay, I’ll give you all the answers right here, right now. The best part for me? I’m letting someone else do the heavy lifting to provide an excellent how-to book on successful content marketing. The book is yours free. Just click for an instant download of It Takes a Content Factory – A Guide to Creating and Delivering the Content Your Company Needs to Attract and Retain Great Customers by Open View Labs.

The post Content Marketing: Time + Quality = Money appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

There are always people out there looking to make quick money with services based not on uncompromising quality but minimalism or mediocrity. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different of an industry.

I learned years ago that there is this “website designers vs. SEO” mentality. For real results, SEO must be involved throughout the entire website design process.

Whether you call the clean coding of a website good SEO practice or first-rate website development, your’re missing the boat. Does SEO include making sure the website is coded optimally? Yes, but it’s only part of the overall picture.

Having a website built by a first-rate website designer using clean code is good starting point since we can then focus on more important aspects of SEO including keyword research, keyword tracking, other On-Page SEO tactics, Off-Page SEO, and Content Creation. By having your website perfectly coded, you are only implementing one part of your SEO Strategy.

Your website is the foundation for your marketing and lead generation efforts. However, it does not by itself generate new leads for your business. It makes a good impression on people searching for you directly but great SEO is how you actually gain NEW leads online. Let’s look at myth versus fact about achieving SEO results.

Myth: “Search engine optimization is only about outranking your competitors…”

Fact: SEO is not only about outranking competitors. It is all about driving quality traffic to your site for more opportunities to make a sale. Off-Page SEO increases your rankings, but just as importantly, gains quality referral traffic to your site.

Myth: “If you have competitor websites that are doing HTML properly…they will outrank you”

What are Google’s and other popular search engines’ number one goal? Provide the most credible and relevant results to their end users.

Fact: Credibility comes from Off-Page SEO, which builds links to your site. These links,also referred to as backlinks, are seen as votes of credibility to the search engines. Google will rank a site with many credible backlinks and that is coded at a third-rate website design level well before a site without credible backlinks that is perfectly coded.

Myth: “SEO techniques are usually only required if your site has quality competition.”

Fact: Very few niches nowadays have such low amount of competition where just optimal coding can get you ranking on the first page, as optimal coding is only one aspect of the SEO lead generation strategy.

Myth: “It’s worse if the SEO staff is inside the design agency.”

Fact: Keyword research and analysis finds the profitable and accessible phrases around which to base the website’s content. This is best completed before writing even one piece of code. If you develop a site and then incorporate SEO afterwards, it’s not a true results-driven marketing or lead generation effort.

Again, web design isn’t something that generates leads or quality traffic. It is where your leads are directed to learn more and buy. SEO is the actual lead generation aspect to gain new business online.

It’s important to make sure SEO is involved from the start so that the website is built on the most profitable and accessible keyword phrases. Oftentimes a website designer without knowledge of SEO will develop a perfectly coded site that doesn’t make first page search results and therefore sits in a dark back alley of the Internet only gaining low quality traffic that never leads to any sales.

If you are in this position, then perhaps our team can recharge your lead generation.

Jon Parker is the owner of Recharged Business Solutions. On the web: www.nhleadgeneration.com  Phone: (603) 493-6344 Email: jparker@rechargedsolutions.com

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