SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process to get a placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). With the many method used to obtain high-placement, or ranking, many website owners and webmasters have gone to great lengths to leverage what they have.
The common way to get a website ranked on search engines, is to use the organic way. This uses methods to get natural placement using algorithm-driven results on search engines, and to obey any policies they have.
The reason that made organic SEO common is that it doesn't require paid marketing, but more into efforts followed by even more efforts. But the efforts are well worth it. But here are the problems: organic SEO is more difficult and time consuming. This SEO initiative can take weeks or even month before the results can be seen.
For SEO professionals, this is the way things work and that's the way they should face. And here is how they should convince client to help them understand.
In a field that is growing, there should be more than just recommendations. People want more than just information, they need results. Here is where SEO professionals need to show the value, and that is the value of the recommendations themselves.
From reporting dashboards, software knowledge and industry-specific networking, clients need to know what's what to understand how things work.
Before digging deep into the actions, we need to think about "long-term SEO". This generally takes a longer period of time to have an effect on SEO progress. Strategies include, and not limited to: case studies, link-building programs, schema recommendations, meta optimizations and so forth.
Here, SEO professionals describe how each can impact the way search engines see. From the perspective, a well-designed and developed website won't be just faster and more reliable, but it'll be easier to manage and needs less time to maintain.
One of the great things about the search industry is the ability to share information, and the willingness to help one another by benefiting each other. On the internet that is still growing, there probably isn't anything that has not been said and done.
To show the value in a long-term strategy, the first thing to do is search. Here they need to see what others have said about certain things, and see what are the results search engines have to give. And because there are answers to the questions, SEO professionals can get the potential data they need.
Putting them all together, and by binding them with real information involving the strategy as well as understanding how the competitors are doing, recommendations then can be made to push the value upwards by giving clients performance perspectives.
Instead of starting big and pushing everything forward, organic SEO is better to start small. By create testing grounds and gradually roll the strategy to other sections. By starting small and by providing use cases surrounding the subject, clients can see things on a small scale to see a quicker results.
And by ramping the strategy using creativity and strategic thinking as well as social media, results should be well predicted.
Search Data and Keywords
By using analytics, SEO professionals can provide information about how clients' website are performing. They can document clicks and queries, and also get insights about keywords and content ideas. They can also see how the overall impression and query data grows against time.
When clients see that a strategy does make an impact, SEO professionals can show clients that the long-term SEO is well worth the time to wait.
This is because ideally, as a website improves, so does its overall search visibility.
Design and Conversion Rate
SEO is to make search engines "like" a website. But that is one effort that should be followed by more efforts.
One of the things that can tell whether or not a website succeed in its SEO attempt is its conversion rate. This is too frequent over-hyped. SEO, like previously said, is how to make a website to rank well on search engines, but it doesn't necessarily affect its conversion rate.
Search engines and humans have a lot in common, and one of the things that they like is information. Search engines rank a website well if they see it worth. But search engines don't convert - but humans do. Search engines just funnel the traffic to the website, and the rest isn't their concern.
Conversion rate is a metric that often overlooked. A well implemented organic SEO won't measure conversion rate as a while because different sections target different parts of the funnel. But by breaking them down, conversion rate metrics can provide some key insights.
Here is where web design and development come to their role. By having an appealing interface with the appropriate call-to-actions, websites should be able to convert those visitor traffic into leads, and then into sale.
Conclusion
With millions of website already on the internet and many more are coming each day, competition is getting tighter. Everyone is competing for even lesser user time. But the chances of competing won't be that difficult when well-crafted strategies are implemented successfully.
To most websites, traffic comes mostly from search engines. This is where SEO comes to play. The biggest challenge for SEO professionals in terms of organic SEO is how to drive executions and able to show the results. This is why providing values today is more important than "promising" an end result that is yet to be seen.
Paid search, search engine marketing and social media marketing can give immediate results. Clients will see the results of their attempt quickly. And if something goes wrong, they can quickly adjust to test and do further retests.
But that isn't how organic SEO works.
Organic SEO needs patience and consistency. Results can take a long time and the efforts are continuous. But the results can be permanent. So the value here is to provide small wins in an attempt for bigger ones to follow.
For a long-term strategy, this is where focusing on small wins should come victorious.