Jacksonville SEO: What’s the point?
Right up until last summer, I was hearing serious local influencers tell me that “Jacksonville is a boots on the ground town.” Success here is belly-to-belly;in person relationships are the only way to success. But it didn’t work for me, personally. I don’t like networking in person, I prefer the phone and online. I would prefer to read about someone than have them stand in front of me and spew words all over me without a polite inquiry back. Comfortably ignoring all, I sat home working on SEO, social media marketing and website design. For my clients, for me, for my kids, for everything… including my church, and my singing group.
The result? I win Jacksonville Business Journal’s Best Lead Generating Website of the Year for a client. The thing has generated $ millions in leads since it hit #1 on all 3 primary search engines.
But don’t take my word for it. Here is reinforcement from respected sources:
Today, it’s important to consider SEO as an option in parallel with other established lead channels such as Public Relations, Advertising, and Referral Generation.
SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.
Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%.
70-80% of users ignore the paid ads, and only focus on the organic results.
The best aspect is that SEO is not a direct marketing tactic, yet it is one of the most effective inbound marketing tool available beyond paid ads… and lasts a lot longer!
95% of marketers use search engine marketing for inducing loyalty among their existing customers. (Regalix, 2014)
How awesome would it be if your buyer finds you on Google once, and then keeps on seeing you without specifically searching for you?
It makes sense that organic search leads would convert at a higher rate than social or outbound efforts because someone has to be looking for you to find you that way. They are obviously on their way to buying or researching a buy if they found you on Page 1 of the search engines.
Putting yourself in front of someone looking to buy is how sales have happened forever. Think: market stalls.
Here are the critical factors that keep us SEO practitioners up at night:
Trust Flow measures how good your backlinks are – how reliable. If you have managed to build a bunch of links to your site and they’re all from spammy accounts or foreign IP addresses or a completely different field, the search engines will return a LOW Trust score. It comes down to authenticity:-
What do you do? Why should I trust you with my money? And who else has used you and had great results?
The Search Engines assume that a site with more people pointing to it is more useful and authoritative than a site no-one has read or shared or connected with at all. This metric does not weigh the quality of the links, just that there are some.
Is your site about you say it’s about, in Google’s estimation? Does the content match up to the keyword? Is it original?
Do you have social accounts, and do you talk about the same subject on those accounts as your website purports to represent? If your site is about surfing, and your social accounts have no mention of surfing then Your SEO would suffer. However, if each account is linked and they all reflect interest, wisdom and authority on surfing, the SEO would see an integrated whole and raise the rank accordingly.
Since most folks get frustrated with a page that takes too long to load, the search engines track that too. A page that takes too long to load won’t keep much traffic because impatient people will bounce off the site quickly. Google then considers it a waste of time even sending them there in the first place, so your site drops. A weird metric this, but one that is an important one that can trip up the most sleek professionals