Search Optimization | Authority and Relevance | A CXL Institute Review

Over the past few months, a major focus for me at HALOS has been building out our initial GTM strategy for our new platform, Auri.

I noticed myself really sticking to what I'm comfortable with.

I love video, I love podcasting, I love social media activities, but SEO has never been my cup of tea in the marketing game.

To be honest, I thought it was sort of boring. I'd rather interview someone or shoot dope videos and build some killer ads than worry about my ranking on a web page.

Insert Healthcare.

A very Google-centric industry when individuals are looking for products and services.

Search for something usually goes something like this:

Step 1. Call industry friend who knows what they're talking about and ask them what they're using.

Step 2. Google it.

Step 3. Book a demo.

So for me, I had to find how to get to the top of those Google rankings and steal away some traffic from the big boys.

So I had to dig, and I've been digging over the past month or so into how to rank, get clicks, and convert those clicks into demos.

What I'll be writing over the next few blogs will be all about my learnings.

I really think this will be beneficial to you guys as it has been for me because organic search is a major part of the most successful content marketing campaigns.

It's a key ingredient in generating a consistent stream of qualified visitors which will obviously increase brand awareness, which is step one to conversion and winning the internet in your niche.

Understanding why SEO is Important

What really made me change my mind on not only the importance of SEO but the excitement of it was the fact that right now as we sit here people are looking for you.

As we speak, there are people searching for what you do or how to do it themselves.

People are constantly looking for stuff all the time, all day, every day, nonstop. And so it is extremely valuable to be relevant on Google.

I'm about to say the most obvious thing in the world, but web pages that rank high in Google tend to get tons more clicks than the ones that don't rank as high.

When was the last time you actually went to page 2 on Google? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Your audience has to become aware of us before they consider us or before they take action and convert.

So search is just an amazingly powerful tool for attracting that visitor and building awareness.

Because people are searching for what you're doing day in and day out, the traffic from it is much more consistent than social and even email.

Our focus needs to be on moving the needle in our search optimization to complement the hard work of shooting the videos, writing the blogs, and recording the podcasts.

More than just ranking?

Now there's more to search than rankings. (I didn't realize this)

Of course, it has to begin with the key phrase and the visitor's intent, and the fact that if people aren't searching for your key phrase, ranking won't even matter.

Ranking for a key phrase that no one's searching for doesn't help you. Sound obvious?

You have to know what your audience is actually typing into Google. And of course, do you have a chance of even ranking for it?

Then the next question you have to answer is do you have a relevant page for that topic? Like does your page actually answer the question that people are searching for? Ya know, like the not so important stuff...

Ranking, by the way, isn't SEO by itself either. (Again, big woah moment for me)

If you can rank all day long and no one clicks on it, you get no traffic.

So really what we're trying to get is the click from that rank.

The rank doesn't matter if there's no click, and the click doesn't matter if there's no action once on your site.

I'll even go one step further, the action doesn't matter if your sales team sucks. But that's a whole nother blog post for a whole nother time.

Search is a major part of your entire campaign, it's a compliment to your entire strategy.

Every page on your website has the chance to catch traffic from search just like a sail catches wind.

The best part about this is you can simply add sails to your boat at any time (blogs), and they can rank higher and higher over a long period of time, catching more and more wind.

Now my favorite platform is social, but social media is much more labor-intensive and you have to keep working at it.

Social media is great, it's just more like a rowboat. You've gotta put your back into it and row that boat. And you get blisters on your hands from posting every day, from shooting the videos, from building ads for your podcast.

I'm not saying these suck, I love them, they're just simply harder. You have to keep doing it.

If you stop doing email marketing, you stop getting traffic from email marketing. If you want to grow your social presence you have to put more resources in there because it doesn't keep happening unless you keep putting resources toward it.

Advertising might be fast, but it's temporary. Content might be slow, but it stands the test of time.

Dave Gerhardt talks about the first blog post he ever posted at Drift and how it still ranks number one on Google with the featured snippet.

One hard day's work could get you multiple years of results.

The spikes in traffic are sexy, but the long tail that comes after, the people coming back 20, 30, 50, 100 times a day is from search.

The home run in search isn't ranking for a keyword and getting a spike of traffic, it's ranking and continuing to get links back, have people refer to it and get that long-tail traffic, that featured snippet, and multiple conversions from a one time post.

Just a quick reminder of why search is so important: Intent.

Search is going to drive you a higher quality of traffic. Theoretically, visitors from search have intent, they are typing what they want onto a keyboard.

Unlike social media where they're scrolling through a stream, visitors from search are navigating their way to finding a solution to a problem they have or they have commercial intent to buy.

In either case, they typed something in because they want that thing.

They're trying to find a page that meets their expectations.

Social media, not so much.

This was an absolute gamechanger for my mindset.

Technical SEO

So there's this portion of SEO called technical SEO, which refers to improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines.

The basic premise is that pages basically rank for two reasons.

There are off-site signals and on-page signals.

In other words, there are links from other websites that make that page credible, and there are keywords on that website that indicate its relevance for a topic.

Another way to look at this, there's authority and there's relevance.

Authority is whether or not other sites are linking to your site making you credible.

Relevance is whether or not you are using keywords appropriately.

Linking away from your website doesn't affect your rankings.

Keywords on other web pages don't affect your rankings.

What matters is when you indicate relevance for what you do and when you get confidence, and votes, and authority passed to you from other websites through links.

That's the game.

Ranking potential and authority flows around the internet through links. From one website to another, through internal links on an individual domain, between links and pages on different domains.

That's how it works.

Think about it this way. You can't just walk up and tell people you're credible. The credibility comes from people saying "Hey you can trust this guy."

This get's a lot deeper, but the play really is writing content that truly helps others solve problems and building relationships so that people link back to your content.

The more links back to you, the more people that are talking about you, the better ranking you'll be.

Relevance

Let's talk relevance now.

Research shows that actually 80% of the key phrases people search for online are informational key phrases.

They want information. They're looking for answers to questions. They're doing research themselves.

It might be a DIY type solution seeker.

Only 10% of searches are actually transactional, people who are ready to spend money.

They know they need a solution. They're aware of their needs and they're looking for a product or a service.

So that means there are two kinds of visitors. Transactional visitors and informational visitors.

This means you have to tie the key phrases you want to rank for specifically for the people you're trying to reach.

Are you trying to hit the 80% of people looking for information and playing long ball to get them to convert or are you going after the 10% and rank for key phrases that bring people directly to your services page to buy.

Little math lesson, I'd rather play long ball with the 80%.

The key here is to be relevant to what they're searching for.

We talked about it last week.

You can't expect to rank for a topic if anytime someone goes to your page it has absolutely nothing to do with what they searched for.

For instance, "How to write a blog post" and then they end up at your services page for you writing blog posts for them.

As I end this post I want to say that there is a lot of technical stuff that goes into SEO.

It's not about simply vomiting your key phrases all over your page, it's far more strategic and that's what I'll go into coming up next week.

The strategic aspect that I've learned and we're actually utilizing at HALOS to climb the ranks in our space.

Next week we'll discuss in detail all of the tactical ninja secrets I learned over the past month at CXL Institute specifically regarding ranking higher in search without spending tons of money on Adwords.

Until Next Time.