10 Reasons Why You Need an Expert SEO Company

SEO Ain’t Easy and Here’s Why You Need an SEO Pro

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1. If You Build It, They Will Not Come

2. The SEO Rules Change Every Day

3. People Search Differently

4. It’s Not Just a Meta Tag

5. The Best Visits Come from Search Engines

6. SEO Becomes a Social Butterfly

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7. It’s All About Getting the “Google Love”

8. Because Bad Things Happen When You Don’t SEO or You Stop

9. It’s Not “One and Done”; It Takes Commitment

10. Because Doing SEO Right Drives Results and Revenue

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1. If You Build It, They Will Not Come

Image of Kevin Costner from "A Field of Dreams." If You Build It, They Will NOT Come - Why You Need SEO Services from a Pro - Erik Foss, Foss Marketing Group

Don’t get me wrong, I like Kevin Costner. Several of his films are among my favorite of all time, including “A Field of Dreams.” However, if you listen to the advice coming from some baseball spirit in that film which said, “If you build it, they will come,” and apply that philosophy to your web site, your web site will have no one watching your game from your empty bleachers.

You cannot rely on some fantastical baseball spirit from corn fields in Iowa when it comes to getting your web site found in Google search results. You risk becoming very sad from all of the missed opportunity that hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of monthly visits from search engine search results could have provided you, now all going to your competitors’ web sites who have taken SEO seriously.

That mystical instruction does NOT apply to web sites and getting found on Google. I mean, just look at this photo from that film that actually foreshadows the search engine traffic issue. How many people do you see in this picture? That’s right. Just one. The guy that built the field.

And while I have a strong belief in faith, faith without SEO efforts will not get your web site found on Google. If you do not do the things Google expects to find and wants to find, they will not index your pages for the phrases that could be driving you countless sales.

Even if you find your own web site in search results, remember, your results are skewed to the sites you visit most often (like your own web site!). That’s not what the average person sees. If you are found for your own company name, I contend so what?! Big deal! You’re still missing huge opportunities. If you are are found for one good non-brand name phrase, great. But stop patting yourself on the back. It’s just one phrase. There are dozens (potentially thousands) of other searches you need to be found for. Your “Hey I didn’t do anything to get found,” attitude is myopic and lazy.

If you do not optimize your web site for search engines correctly after the web site is launched, it will not be found, and they will not come. And if they do happen to stumble upon your baseball diamond amongst the corn fields in the middle of nowhere, they won’t stay to buy your hot dogs and big Number 1 foam fingers. SEO is much bigger than a search result. Read on dear friend…

 

2. The SEO Rules Change Every Day

The search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, AOL and others) control the math (the search algorithm) that determines which pages from which web sites are provided to search engine users in their search results. The search engine algorithm is as secret as the Kennedy assassination files, the Big Mac special sauce used by McDonald’s, and the truth behind Area 51 aliens.
 
No one outside of those in charge at those search engines knows the math. These are private, for profit companies. They don’t have to disclose the math behind the search engine ranking results. Don’t bother trying to kidnap an intern or custodial worker. They’d be fired on sight for breathing a word, if they knew anything at all — and they don’t.
 

Three Truths About SEO Every Business Owner Needs to Understand

No one outside of those insiders knows the math and no one can promise or guarantee a page one search result. There are three hard truths every business with a web site must come to terms with.
 
First truth: NO ONE can promise a page one result. No one! If you are promised a page one, organic search result, you are being lied to.  If you are interviewing SEO professionals and someone guarantees you they can deliver page 1 with an organic search result, trust me and thousands of other experts worldwide, you need to pass on their services. They are scamming you.
 
Second truth: No one knows when the search engines will change their math and that any change won’t alter your current page ranking overnight, on any night, or at any time.
 
Third truth: Google and other search engines tweak their algorithm and code, on average, TWO TIMES EACH DAY! They do this to ensure they are staying ahead of hackers trying to game the system. They update the math constantly to ensure search results provide the core service to their customer, the search engine user, with reliable search results.
 
Google loses customers to Bing if they do not deliver search results from reliable, authentic and authoritative web sites based upon the precise keywords and types of searches that are executed. So it’s simple. They are working to keep their customers. If you want Google love, you have to work at it to get new customers.

Pandas, Penguins and Other Creatures that Change Your Page Ranking

Every once in a while, Google updates the algorithm significantly with changes aimed directly at trends that have resulted in previous months that they do not approve of. Often these are targeted at directories, services and other web sites that are behaving maliciously and stealing positions from more authoritative pages.
 
These changes sometimes get names like “the Panda update,” or “the Penguin update.” In fact, in 2012, these currently have a significant impact on sites that followed one previously accepted SEO practice, countless inbound links from any external web site. What happened was many SEO professionals and web site developers providing SEO were gaming the system by getting external link-backs from sites that had no relevance to the site itself.
 
What does this mean for SEO? What was acceptable last year Google may determine is now evil. It also means that literally overnight, large percentages of search results can be changed significantly.
 
One more thing to remember. Google and the other search engines do not announce those algorithm changes until AFTER they actually make them. They don’t make a big deal about them either. You won’t find Google CEO Larry Page on CNBC or the CBS Evening News announcing the changes to the world. No. They quietly announce them to the world on blog posts or Tweets.
 
Some updates can change your search results significantly without warning. You worked for weeks or months (or years) to get to a page rank and suddenly your web site pages have dropped in SERP ranking (Search Engine Results Page ranking) by several spots, maybe several pages…maybe off the radar altogether. Overnight. I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m being honest.
 
What do you do? How do you fix your site to remain in compliance? How do you do your best to maintain and grow your page ranks for your web site? You need a reliable, ethical search engine optimization professional to help you.
 

3. People Search Differently

This should come as no surprise but it is easy to forget or to make quick assumptions that other people search the same way as you do. But people search differently and search behaviors change.

Search Behaviors Change Over Time

As search is no longer new (only “new” to either the very young just learning or the very old who are very late to the web), most of us have using search engines for a while, and most of us use them daily…like 50 times a day kind of daily. Some of us have been using search engines since the early 1990s.

As we use the engines regularly, we try different search phrases and search techniques to get the results we need. You and I both know that getting the best result doesn’t always happen with our initial inclination toward the correct keyword, search phrase or search technique. It sometimes takes several attempts during one search exercise to deliver the page that delivers the solution we seek.

We often start out with broad stroke type searches using practical or common, but simple or short keywords or two word phrases. Then we might retry with a localized word like their local city or state. People begin to use longer, more specific phrases (we call in the biz, “long tailed phrases”) and other literally type the question they have from the inner voice in their head as if they were talking to a friend. And many experienced searchers know that they can use quotation marks  or brackets or other search techniques to yield the desired result.

Search Behaviors Change Seasonally

If you are an experienced business owner or executive, you know that business is cyclical and seasonal. Every business and every industry has its own nuanced cycle and seasons. Some of us are the belle of the ball come December, while others take that month off. Some of us are incredibly slow during summer while others couldn’t be busier. Search engine search behaviors will and do follow similar industry trends. Depending upon the season, either the traditional sense or the industry specific season, people use different phrases at different times and your web site needs to adjust and be ready for them.

Search Behaviors Change Geographically

As you might expect, people from different parts of a region, state, country or global regions search differently. Depending upon the geographic target of your business, your SEO efforts need to be mindful of the language, vernacular, colloquialisms, and education levels of your target markets. If you are only concerned with reaching new customers in Sacramento, CA, you have less to worry about. But if you are reaching people throughout California, plus Texas and New York, or need to drive business from the US, Australia and Germany, your web site needs to be optimized for those language differences.

Over time, humans experiment, they get smarter and they change how they search depending upon the need and even their current position in the purchase life cycle. Never assume your non-optimized web site is designed out of the box to be found given this search variety. Most web designers know not clue one about SEO and do not build SEO into their site builds. Even SEO-friendly web designers know the SEO effort is exhausting and they typically do not quote for SEO as part of the initial web site design and build. Never assume your out of the box web site is optimized for search. SEO is truly an ongoing, never ending, complex process of multiple facets.
 

4. It’s Not Just a Meta Tag

It’s not just about being some smelly code jockey that promises you he can hack your site to page one. It’s not just about technology and some “code,” that gets you found. It’s much more than that. It’s working with an SEO professional that thinks like a marketer, like a business strategist, like your VP of sales.
 
It’s far more complex than some snippets of html, submitting your site to search engines and getting some links from irrelevant web sites. It’s about making a real connection with your site visitors, delivering real value, communicating and making your site easy to use.
 
It starts with good site design and keeps going with relevant content…and going and going and going. SEO is not a “do it once and forget it” marketing tool like a business card or brochure. It’s a living, organic, ever-changing marketing being. If you don’t feed it regularly, it will die.
 
SEO requires a steady investment, but it does not need to be excessive by any stretch. Yet long term, the ROI from SEO has been proven for years to be the second best marketing investment next to email marketing (if you don’t invest in referrals/word of mouth marketing, which is always the lowest cost).
 
Done right, the ROI on SEO beats online ads, telemarketing, TV/radio/broadcast, trade show marketing, direct mail and the rest. Together, SEO plus broadcast and email marketing prove to be a highly potent combination.

 

5. The Best Visits Come from Search Engines

The experience from the clients I’ve worked with over the years, having tracked their site traffic and analyzed their data, in addition to similar data from objective data sources and industry experts, demonstrate that the best web site traffic for businesses…any business… comes from Google and other search engines.
 
In general, search engines are where people who are seriously looking for help, for a solution, for a partner, a product or an answer go. Most use Google (typically people start with Google first by a gross approximation of about 40:1) at some point in their “search” process. Oh sure, they might ask a co-worker, their bank teller, post a question on Facebook or call their mom, but at some point, the person from the demographic you want uses Google. We SEO pros use a little saying: People go to Google to find their answer. They go to Facebook to talk about it.
 
Afterall, Google alone delivers 6.7 billion search results globally each and every day. Ya, I know. That’s a lot! And no, that’s NOT a typo. I said six point seven BILLION with a capital “B.” Each day! I know, right?! That seems crazy, but it’s true.
 
Seriously, when was the last time you used Google? Oh wait. Let me guess first before you answer. Ummm, about 5 minutes ago? Nailed it! Oh yeah, tell me what I won! And I’ll also guess it wasn’t your first search today, or even this hour.
 
Let’s not under-estimate other unofficial search engines. Sites that people search in much greater numbers than Bing or Yahoo! for answers, but are not counted in official “search engine” marketing data; site like YouTube and Twitter deliver tens of billions of search results every month, and now Pinterest. While that content is optimized specifically for those sites, if your primary web site is not correctly optimized, you won’t keep the traffic you get from Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. It’s much bigger than you think! But I digress…
 
No matter what site, industry, or business, the best traffic comes from search results. Search engine users have an immediate need – or at least more immediate than people using other methods. They are more serious and they typically need an answer or are ready to purchase now.
 
So what do I mean by, “the best traffic comes from Google”? That means that visitors to your web site coming from a search engine typically spend more time per page, visit more pages, spend more time per visit overall, and completes the desired conversion behavior at a much higher rate than traffic coming from other sources, like referral sites or direct traffic.
 
And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines should drive 70 percent or more of your monthly site traffic if your web site is optimized correctly. Let’s consider that statistic. If you want 10,000 visitors in a month, search engines should drive 7,000 of those targeted visits for FREE. The remaining 3,000 visits can then be easily garnered through social networking referral sites, other referral sites, some paid (maybe 10% total) and the rest from direct visits, email marketing, repeat visits and other non-paid sources.
 
What if you needed 10,000 monthly visits, but organic free visits amounted to only 1,000 per month. Let’s suppose, not excessively, that you need to make up the difference in a hurry so you are willing to pay for some clicks using Google AdWords or Facebook ads. Let’s say you had to pay to get the difference in visits.
 
For the sake of keeping the argument simple, let’s say you needed to pay to get 6,000 visits in month. The average cost per click on AdWords (for the sake of argument…and I’m likely low-balling that argument) is $4.00 per click. That’s $24,000 in a month to get that traffic. Granted some clicks can cost under $1.00 but that is rare these days. On the opposite end, some industries like the Insurance industry regularly see average cost per clicks (aka CPCs) of $25-$40 per. The clients for whom I manage AdWords have varying averages depending upon all of the factors involved with pay per click advertising.
 
So instead you invest a small monthly fee with an SEO expert, and for perhaps $2,000 per month you could be getting 7,000 visits. That’s $0.29 cents per visit. Much better right?
 

6. SEO Becomes a Social Butterfly

The search algorithms now weight social media channels and good social media content as important, and that weight is becoming more prominent. These days, if Google is choosing who to rank first for a search and the choice is between a company with keyword rich social channels like Twitter and Facebook, and a company without any social channels, the company with the social channels wins.
 
In large part social channels are replacing the pre-Penguin SEO era’s emphasis on external link backs from other web sites. Penguin updates have eliminated the benefit of countless links, especially from non-content relevant or high authority sites. And because blogging is a challenge for many web site owners, links from social content like those you add into a Tweet or from a Facebook post, have become increasingly important.
 
And, the elephant in the room (Google) is eating more peanuts and wants its social entree Google Plus to have more importance in its search rankings. Meaning, if you want to get page rank bounces you need your site visitors to Plus One your site pages and posts using the Google+ widget. Sharing your content on Google+ is key.
 
Lastly, do not forget that more people conduct searches on Twitter every month than on Yahoo! and Bing combined…by a significant margin. Similar data exists for Pinterest and other sites including YouTube. This means that if you do not have a strong, content rich presence on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and other sites, you are missing tremendous opportunities to reach potential customers or even dormant current clients who are looking for subject matter experts, industry authorities, partners, and businesses like yours.
 
Social media channels and marketing is still in its relative infancy. It, like other SEO rules, change every day. It’s not too late to enter your brand into social media and it’s never too late to improve any current efforts. But one thing is absolute. Social media will continue to play heavily on your search engine page rank and on your brand’s ability to reach new audiences through social media.
 

7. It’s All About Getting the “Google Love”

Optimizing your site to reach the top of a page one Google search result takes a considerable effort. It is a blend of both art and science; of technological expertise and marketing experimentation. Despite what anyone may think. It’s not easy. It takes an expert. And to succeed, you need someone that knows how to get Google to love your web site.
 
For many web sites struggling to get the page rank they expected from the naive “If I build it Google will come” mentality, sometimes we have to begin by making sure the search engines know you WANT to be found. They may not even know you want to be found because you haven’t done the technical and content tasks necessary to get the party started.
 
You have to love Google first to get the Google love you seek. Meaning, you have to know their rules, play by their rules, communicate with them and then do all the right things with your web site with a heavy emphasis on good, keyword rich content.
 
Novices, interns, “consultants” without a track record of actual SEO site management, your 18 year old nephew, your IT guy, most web designers, nor your own attempt to learn SEO in a weekend will get the job done. You need an proven expert.
 

8. Because Bad Things Happen When You Don’t SEO or You Stop

Lots of things go wrong, you lose your momentum when you stop SEO | FossMG.com
If you do not take SEO seriously, you will not reap the rewards from low or no cost targeted site visits from the potential hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of daily searches made by active, potential customers.
 
If you start and stop, or if you do not tell your story and keep your web site fresh, you will lose any page rank you have earned. It doesn’t take long to lose site visits from free search clicks, which often leads to reductions in time on site, pages per visit, and increases in bounce rates (the number of people leaving the site in 12 seconds or less).
 
You might never get to page 5 let alone page 1, and you will lose the search engine marketing game to your competitors that do invest in optimizing their web site.
 
SEO is an organic marketing medium like social media marketing. If you want to be successful, you have to provide resources and attention to it daily, like having a sales team needs to always be selling and like your cash register always needs to be ringing. Provide your SEO efforts the proper commitment and resources and it will pay off handsomely.
 

9. It’s Not “One and Done”; It Takes Commitment

 

10. Because Doing SEO Right Drives Results and Revenue

compare the cost of organic clicks vs buying clicks.

there is no better external lead generation and sales generation resource than SEO.

email ROI is better for internal emails, not external
WOMM ROI is better but the reach and speed are significantly worse than SEO
social

the most potent combination you can have for marketing:
Great SEO + targeted TV ads + engaged internal email lists

 

Give us 6 months. We can give you 50% or more new traffic from search engines.

Our clients typically see 50% – 70% – 100% or more new visits from Google search within the first 6 months – and then that much growth again in the second 6 months.

we can tell where on your web site people engage and where they leave? can your brochure or your radio ad tell you which part sold them, or which part made them ignore you?
fossmg can tell you and we know what to do about it through a combination of technical improvements and creative executions.