3 Things You Can Do Now To Be Found in Search Engine Results

When it comes to marketing your business online, there are benefits (relatively affordable costs) that double over as challenges (increased competition). No matter how saturated your market may be, there are ways to get past those obstacles… simply by narrowing your efforts to a specific audience.

This is why smaller businesses have a leading advantage over mid-sized companies. By focusing on a local audience, the demographic filtering allows local service providers to generate a higher ROI (from search engine positioning) than a competitor who serves a larger region. With that being said, the first and most important thing you can do to be found in search engine results is…

Clean Up Your Keyword List

Sure, there are a lot of search phrases that would love to rank for… but having such a long list of target keywords can actually hurt more than it will help. Instead, narrow down your list to approximately 5 core phrases: describing your product(s) or service(s) in a way that has a high search volume, but specific enough to minimize competition.

Put Customers First, Always!

You may have heard somebody, somewhere, advise: “Quality Before Quantity”.

It’s not just a catchy phrase, and it’s not just related to content marketing. The concept is to put people first, because in the end that’s what matters most. Without customers, you wouldn’t have sales. Customers are people, and people prefer to be treated like people than customers.

So… if your customer service is superior, you will have a leading advantage over competitors. The frosting on the cake is that really happy customers tend to write raving reviews. (The flip side of the coin is that negative reviews are more common…)

p>If you want your online reputation to work in your favor, you must focus on maintaining above-and-beyond customer satisfaction. Surpass their expectations. This includes, but is not limited to, the topics you choose for your blogs. Believe it or not, useful topics that are published for subscribers instead of search engines are far more valuable. Just saying.

Offer a Loyalty Program (or, something like that)…

Loyalty programs work to bring customers back. Yes, they would have come back anyways. Yes, they may still shop at a competitor. Yet customers are likely to return to your business more than they would anyways when there is an opportunity to win or earn a reward for frequent patronage.

When it comes to your website, it hurts when visitors “bounce” (or leave your website within the first 30 seconds) so you make every effort to keep new visitors interested.

But… what are you doing to make sure visitors come back and visit your website again?

What do these things have to do with search engine results placement?

SEO is one of those things that’s easy to screw up when you try too hard or over think it. When websites put excessive energy into optimizing, it shows on the front end and it hurts. You see, search engines are providing a service to internet users by displaying the most relevant, valuable results based on a search phrase. That’s why Google algorithms are updated so often… to clean up the low-quality results and improve the value of their services as a search engine.

So the most obvious solution is to prioritize the quality, value, and relevancy of your own website (and customer experience) to ensure sustainable results.