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I recently started working with a company who offers a drop-ship online service, and they got cheated by a supposed SEO company who took their investment and never logged into their site once.  I always hate it when a few bad apples make business hard for others in the industry.

I always look at a company website as being a storefront, and if you retain my services, it is my job to drive qualified traffic to your site.  The content, and calls to action, on the website, should be compelling enough to clearly speak to the user’s needs / interests and make them convert.  Now the term convert is often a bit of a grey area.  In the world of marketing, conversion is someone who clicks on a call to action and does one of three things: requests a call, downloads some collateral, or registers for something. (I realize that I am generalizing, but for the purposes of this article, those three criteria will work).

If you are in sales, conversion is a request for quote, a request for more information, or a request to give you money now.  That difference makes it often complicated for those in the digital marketing field to present options to management for funding to increase sales pipelines. 

Some of the techniques that I teach marketers is to look at all of the “no-cost” options to increase sales funnels are known to them, and that they only rely on PPC (Pay Per Click Campaigns) as a last resort.  I hate spending money when I don’t have too.

Here are some “White Hat” (Good Guy) techniques for optimizing your website to perform better for you without shelling out cash.

1. Keep your website as easy to crawl as possible- In the military, we lived by the KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid), and it is a rule that continues to prove true. What you want are spiders to be able to visit your page and very easily understand the content on that page.  The text is easy to read, and the images, or embedded videos, are properly tagged so that they can be easily indexed. If your website is not responsive, or too complicated, the spiders get confused and drop indexing it.  Clear, good-looking, and responsive design make your website stand out from your competitors.
   

2. Look at leveraging industry experts to boost your rankings- This is a concept that throws some people off. People will create blogs for a variety of reasons and proclaim themselves “industry experts,” the problem lies in the “expert’s ability to create content that solves the problems of the client. The other question that remains is, are the people actually credible and worthy of internet amplification?  In other words, do readers care about what this expert has to say?
   

3. The third tip is the most important. Make the page load quickly- There is nothing worse on a tablet or phone.  I find that often simple mistake like not optimizing images.  We live in an age of instant gratification, and any more than a three-second pause for a page to load causes stress for the end-user.  They often leave and move to a competitor’s site.  Look at your website from a complete end-user experience (UX Experience).  This will ensure that your website will look good on every platform, and that is what every business wants.  Secure websites with current SSL certificates are always preferred by Google.  It was important over the last three years, and it will continue to be an important factor in 2018.

Those are my three “White Hate” SEO tips for the month of February.  I always stress that anyone engaging an agency, or business, in SEO/ SEM activities check out the business to ensure that they can do what they say that they can do.  There are many hustlers out there, and everyone wants to ensure that they use their head, and engages in good marketing practices with reputable companies.