If you’re a local or national company, you may have noticed that people don’t use phonebooks anymore to find a businesses or a categories of businesses. They use the dynamic, all-inclusive SEARCH for anything and everything. Whether that’s Google, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo, or any of the other search engines.
Should you pay attention to this phenomenon? If you’re not, you’ve officially dropped into the dark ages.
No business owner likes change, but some things can’t be ignored.
Some things that should be performed and monitored on a monthly basis are:
- Position of key search phrases for your business and if they are moving up or down on the results page
- Competitors positions in search for those same key search words or phrases and what they are doing
- Constant improvement to the elements that the search engines use from your site to index in their databases
- Social media improvements such as engaging content, responding to posts, reputation statements, etc.
- Citation site (such as Yelp, Insider Pages, BBB, Yellow Book) improvement and continuity of everything that can be consistent with information on your business
- Making sure rules that have been defined by the search engines, are not broken (such as duplicate content, missing title tags, missing image tags, overuse of keywords or keyword stuffing, and use of low-quality links are some of the many things to watch)
Search engine optimization (SEO) (as defined by Wikipedia) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned" results.