Why SEO is Still at the Core of Your Marketing Efforts

Riding the Wave of SEO

Phil Singleton is a web designer, SEO expert and an award winning author. He teaches actionable tactics to significantly boost website traffic, social media presence and help businesses thrive!

Phil is co-author of the bestseller SEO for Growth, which is listed as a top marketing book by Forbes, Mashable, Oracle and Small Business Trends. Phil’s latest venture, Podcast Bookers, is a service that helps marketers and executives get booked on established podcasts as a way to develop authority, personal branding, improve SEO and most importantly generate new leads and sales.

Doubling Down on SEO and Why it Should Have Always Been A Central Focus

In this episode, Phil and I talk about the major influencers in marketing rumbling about why they've begun to double down on their SEO as well as why Phil says you should have never strayed away to begin with.

Phil talks about unique ways to leverage your unique content, re-purpose and even going so far as having every podcast episode transcribed to benefit your SEO efforts. Phil also talks about why he believes many podcasters are "podfading" after 20 episodes or less.

We talk about capturing emails on your website, striking balance between good design versus solid SEO practices and the latest roll-out of algorithm changes that could vastly change your business if you position yourself appropriately.

Phil and I wrap up talking about utilizing Virtual Assistants in your business and the types of tasks you should have them focus on to beget maximum output.

SEO Didn't Die, We've Just Been Chasing Shiny Objects

I watch people put tremendous time and effort into social media, building audiences in the tens of thousands, going Live on a daily basis and largely molding much of their existence around the next great post.

You know where most of them send that traffic?

Me neither...

Many don't even HAVE a website.

I'll give you another example...

I love podcasters.

As a host of my own show, it's opened up a million doors that truthfully would have required a stick of dynamite, otherwise.

I've got my third Shark from Shark Tank coming on the show as Barbara Corcoran is on the books for later this summer.

Daymond John has been on and I'm now in constant communication with his team.

Over 30+ New York Time's Best Selling Authors and Prime-time televisions hosts.

Literally, people I thought I would never see in the real world, let alone have their undivided attention for over 30 minutes.

Many of these relationships have greatly benefited my business endeavors, creating new opportunities or bridging the gap to a contact whom has the potential to get us front and center with that key person we've sought for months.

You know what I realized?

The ebbs and flows of my podcast downloads were solely reliant on third party platforms like iTunes, Stitcher or all of the various players we all so desperately try to get people to subscribe from.

But you know what most of us (including myself) are NOT doing (for me up until very recently)?

Doing a long-form blog with the audio content.

In less than one month, I've not only seen a 30% increase in downloads but a 60% increase in traffic, a 600% (yes, 600!) in the average session (aka how long someone stays on my site) and email opt-ins converting between 5-10% on every blog with that format!

Crazy, right!?

Again, in less than one month!

Okay, But Isn't SEO That Thing Where People Write Like Robots and Just Fill Pages with Keywords?

I'm sure you've stumbled upon one of those blogs where you have to scroll for 5 seconds before you get past their abundance of filler keywords trying to rank for literally every buzzword in their particular niche.

That, or you found some young, 20-something year old just writing about her favorite make-up products or fashion trends.

While I respect the hustle, I can see why you would have a false narrative carved out in your mind as to why blogging and SEO has a negative connotation in your mind.

But, guess what?

You have a WordPress site?

As in, the WordPress that literally nearly everyone recommends for entrepreneurs and small business owners.

WordPress was created as a, drum roll please, BLOG site!

Now, we've made them fancy and dressed them up with awesome page builders and plugins but at it's core, it was designed to to one thing, rank highly with search engines like Google.

Without delving into too many technical specifics as to why a WordPress site is better than one of those out-of-the box site builders like SqaureSpace, let's just say the part of a website you see is the chassis of a car and the back-end is the engine.

While those eye-candy, drag and drop, builders look amazing it's entirely possible they just aren't going to perform like a well-constructed, WordPress site.

The reason I address this and provide these comparisons is because I personally hear clients and folks I mentor cringe at the sound of my voice telling them they need to be blogging for SEO and making sure they are constructing the core pages of their site for it as well.

Okay, Got It, So What Else SHOULD I Be Doing?

A completely holistic marketing approach is one I would highly advise and I think Phil would concur.

I'm not saying don't go out and build massive followings on social media and go Live to engage your audience.

In fact, I actually highly recommend you do both!

I'm also not saying JUST write blogs with solid SEO but then not also focus on capturing emails once traffic hits your site.

And I definitely don't recommend picking arbitrary keywords to rank for to just flood your pages with random traffic.

What I do think you should do is think about a strategy in your efforts before you just start throwing things out on the web.

For example...

I love Instagram.

I think it's an amazing platform for content creators and businesses to leverage.

It's not only growing in popularity but I love how easy it is for marketers to have constant + frequent contact with their target audience.

It's simple, clean and easy.

I love nurturing my audience on Instagram, providing value to their daily lives as well as tips and pointers.

As a matter of fact, many of my super fans and podcast listeners discover me on social platforms like Instagram before they ever take the next steps in the customer journey.

My goal is to introduce them to my world and get them engaged with various forms of my content.

We re-purpose every podcast episode on social and provide a link to tune in.

If they've been following me for long enough and like what I have to say in terms of advice, it's highly likely they'll at least tune in for episode.

From the podcast, they hopefully become avid, habitual listeners.

They are then just as much a part of my world as my employees.

When I tell them there's free resources on the blog and give them a landing page to visit, they may not click over at first but we get them in the habit of being on the lookout for this added value.

Well, let's say in a worst case scenario, I was unable to captivate them the first go around but later they sit down to Google search an issue they're having in their businesses and boom, there's a blog I wrote about it that coincides with a podcast episode.

Knowing fully who I am with now multiple touch points, I've now established myself as an influencer in their minds as well as getting them onto my optimized website to capture emails.

From that point forward, they download the free resource, join my email list and hear from me weekly, in addition to joining my private Facebook Group, where they can access my community and me, personally.

Having joined the list, they now get a nice little inbox message from me on a weekly basis and when I'm running a promotion or some sort of flash sale, these are now potential customers I've been nurturing for possibly months on end.

Now, the customer journey may happen in a variety of ways and not in that particular order, per se, but the bottom line is you see how you're basically leveraging similar pieces of content to guide them along a certain path and make yourself as visible as possible.

Once mastered, you can throw in other platforms like YouTube (Highly recommend), Facebook, Facebook Ads, Pinterest, etc, etc, etc...

You get the point.

This is a drastic oversimplification as to what everything entails but for the sake of this post and to not ramble on about the micro-elements of marketing campaigns, it gives you a general idea of the type of thinking required in your efforts.

But let me get back to the matter at hand...

SEO Drives Inbound Opportunities

When I was struggling to figure out how to make my first business work, I remember running all over the place, attending networking events, paying thousands of dollars for traditional marketing outlets (like print-ad) and largely still not moving the needle forward enough to justify my efforts (or sustain my livelihood).

The true epiphany came when I had a moment of clarity and realized I needed to triple down on my website and focus on specific keywords for my niche and in my specific geographic location.

I learned what that entailed, studied for weeks as I built the site and did all of my local citations and NAP's.

Within one month we jumped from the fourth page of Google to the first.

Within three months we were top four on the first page and by the fourth month we had leaped past nationwide competitors in that town and found the business soaring to new revenue heights.

By the sixth month, we landed a contract that exceeded our entire previous year's gross revenue and by the eighth month we had reached $500,000...1,000% growth from the previous year.

Now, much went into that growth beyond a website and decent SEO but that was definitely what ignited those opportunities.

So yea, this stuff definitely has the power to move the needle and do so in a major way.

What's more is you can do this on your own with little assistance from a paid professional.

Now, at a certain point I do advise you reach out to a professional like Phil to help you ramp up your efforts and refine your strategies but there's no reason you can't get the ball rolling on your own, today!

To Learn More about Phil, visit KcSEOPro.com

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