The SEO industry does unfortunately seem to have a bad rep and I know a lot of business owners see it as a bit of cash drain.
Yet – everyone knows you need to have a website and an online presence. The question is, how do you make your online presence high enough that you actually make some damn money from it?!
If you’ve been reading up on SEO, you’ll know the importance of doing your on-page SEO– making sure you’re targeting the right keywords on the page, using the right page titles – the usual boring techy stuff! (There’s a great guide from Matt Diggity which explains some good practice tips: https://diggitymarketing.com)
But, when it comes to actually making money from your SEO efforts – its going to need a bit more legwork and thought than that…
An Effective White Hat Strategy
Here are the 3 steps to making sure you have an SEO strategy which will pull in customers and sales – and it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in – this is guaranteed to work!
- Create kick-ass, quality, useful content.
I.e. stuff which people in your audience, your target customers would find mega-useful. Provide value… And please bin those 300 word keyword stuffed articles!
- Nail down your on-page SEO and keyword targeting
While there’s only so far you can go with on-page, definitely not something you want to ignore. And by assessing the kinds of keywords which your potential audience would be searching, you can aim your site and content in the right path.
- Link building (this is the key one!)
This is that missing piece of the puzzle that most business owners are neglecting when it comes to their digital marketing. Start reaching out via email to websites, blogs and influencers where your audience would be and build relationships with the decision makers there. Show them your content – and if it hits the right mark, you’ll be able to earn some very valuable links.
And with the right high quality, contextual links, in enough volume, over a period of time – will improve your traffic. Both organic search traffic (as your site will start to rank better) and referral traffic (coming directly from the site that’s linking out to you). Alternatively, you could hire a reputable link building company to handle this for you! hint hint 😉
Take this example
If you built links from websites where you know, your target audience would be residing and saw a steady rise in traffic like this after 4 months.
Let’s say your average customer value was £500.
And (on average) let’s say conservatively, your site converted 2% of customers.
£500 x (2% x 3,454) = £34,540 in November
Now, that you’ve increased it to 7,962 visits a month, by extension it would now be:
£500 x (2% x 7,962) = £79,620 in March
= an extra £45K a month in revenue.
Which equals this superyacht!
All joking aside – if you create high quality content, it’ll attract high quality links – and high quality traffic will inevitably follow.
The Benefits Of Those Links
Better yet –those links are a long term source of traffic which will continue to serve you well for years down the line.
- You’ll never lose the majority of them (perhaps 2-4% of links on average are lost over time).
- They will continue to improve your site’s authority and increase your ability to rank better on search engine’s (yielding even more organic traffic)
- The results will compound, and you could even have an almost non-linear curvature to your traffic graph (Notice how it seemed to really kick-in around Jan-Feb above?)
- You’ll pretty much be immune to google updates (in fact, you’ll probably grow even faster as everyone is left flailing from it!)
- As you continue building more and more content and getting a reputation in your industry, your brand/product could start to become a hub for info. You’ll garner a lot more respect and recognition and may even start earning links without actually having to actively get them (this is for much further down the line though).
Its An Investment…
It’s important to have the correct SEO strategy in place, and ensuring it involves an effective white hat link building strategy – but its also equally important to have a level of trust and patience when implementing it.
Hitting exactly the right mark with your content (both in terms of resonating with your audience and earning links) is not an overnight process.
Even if you think you know EXACTLY what good content is for your industry and what everyone will like. You may be surprised when you actually start doing outreach . And equally so, you may have some content that seems a bit meh. But, if you reach out to the right person at the right time – you could earn some very valuable links that way. There are also so many other intangibles other than link building that could happen along the way. It also acts as a networking tool, you may get offered a place as a verified vendor or reseller, you could even secure a spot on some print publications – anthings possible! (I’ll discuss this subject of intangible benefits in another article – How Much Money Will You Make From Link Building?)
So what I’m trying to say is the financial benefits can happen straightaway. But equally so, you could have other benefits occur further down the line. It all adds up and is further testament to why any company that wants to build their online presence will have to employ link building in their arsenal.
So before you completely ditch any notion of SEO and abandon your website completely – just think link!