Let’s Talk SEO Marketing Strategy for Atlanta Businesses
What’s the best SEO strategy for Atlanta companies struggling to compete?
Why bother with nailing down a sound SEO strategy in Atlanta – or in any other super-competitive marketplace? Marketing is nothing if not constantly evolving. Best practices for search engine optimization shift and become more complicated and simpler simultaneously, as odd as it sounds.
SEO Marketing Atlanta
Ours is a crowded marketplace. Customers have so many choices available, no matter what product or service they want to buy. A quick search on a smartphone is all it takes to find what you want, just a few miles away. This is great for consumers – all they have to do is find someone who sells what they need and want. It’s not quite so great for business owners who are trying to be that someone those potential customers find.
SEO forms the foundation of any successful online marketing strategy because it’s how your business gets found. Search engine optimization focuses on using and placing the terms your potential customers use to find you. Those terms are called keywords.
Where and How to Use Keywords… Not So Simple
In the past, some crazy tactics worked well. You could stuff keywords into every nook and cranny of your text and the search engines would reward you with more traffic. You even used to be able to include keywords in a font that matched the background of your website, so they’d be invisible to humans… but not to the search engines. Again, the reward was more traffic. Before long, Google clamped down on keyword stuffing and trickery, and businesses that relied on these dubious tactics paid a hefty price for trying them.
The older strategies also placed emphasis on search volume, even ranking it ahead of a keyword’s relevance. This lack of focus on what you’re actually offering your customers might have brought about the page hits you wanted, but the benefits end there.
Now, you’ve got to be careful about using keywords. They need to be used in the right place, with the right keyword frequency, and they’ve got to be used in a way that your visitors like their experience on your site. In some ways, keyword placement is trickier than ever – and in other ways, what actually works makes a lot of sense. Now, it’s all about the site visitor’s experience.
Use The Right Keywords, Attract Better Leads
Ranking high for a certain keyword might seem like a great accomplishment. However, if the high ranking creates a flood of traffic from people who are unlikely to ever buy your products or services, it’s an empty win.
Fielding inquiries from prospective customers takes resources – time and money. With the wrong keywords, the calls coming in may be mostly from people who live too far away to be your customer, or who are not prepared to pay the premium rates common to metropolitan area businesses.
For Better SEO, Go Long
Use short, general keywords and you might get tons of visitors to your website. However, the number of people who actually turn into customers will represent a very small percentage of the page viewers. You might find that many of your visitors are a poor fit for the products and services you sell. On the other hand, a more specific keyword phrase will bring in a much smaller number of hits — these views will also be much more relevant.
For instance, instead of getting a high ranking for “roofer,” which would bring in a great deal of traffic that might not be relevant, you would target the phrase “Atlanta storm repair roofer” instead. The number of visitors you bring in would be smaller, but also more specifically targeted based on your services. As such, the visitors would be much more likely to turn into real leads.
This is a good example of quality over quantity. When you consider that you would spend much less money ranking for a more specific, less searched for phrase, this method only makes even more sense.
Less General SEO Keywords Also Translate to Less Competition
A single word, or a very general phrase, will bring in a staggering amount of search results. If you’re seeking to optimize for these keywords, you’ll end up competing with too many web pages to count! You’d end up spending a lot of money to rank high for these terms, and most of the traffic you bring in wouldn’t even be relevant enough to convert.
According to SEO statistics, if you target more specific phrases, you’ll be facing much less competition, as well as a lower price point for the SEO services you need. Ranking higher would be much easier, and the hits you accumulate would be more likely to turn into sales.
People are always searching the Internet in new ways, and keyword strategies have evolved alongside this development. For example, targeted keywords now reflect phrases people might dictate to their devices as opposed to what they’d type into a search browser. As time goes on, even more will be changing — staying on top of it all is crucial for any business seeking to keep pace with the competition.
Luckily, there are outlets of information that can provide guidance as you move forward to maximize your Atlanta SEO keywords. Look to the experts at SEO for Growth for help navigating the challenges ahead.