Flamingo started out as a social media agency, and we admit it’s still our bread and butter! This past year, however, we’ve been able to ramp up a lot of our other digital capabilities, and we’ve fallen in love with SEO as an extra-special ingredient in our marketing secret sauce.
First of all, what is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of web strategies to make it easier for Google (or Bing, or Duckduckgo, or whatever search engine you use) to find your business and its content. It involves everything from the words you use in your copy, to the amount of images and page headers you use in a particular webpage or blog. By making sure that Google doesn’t have to work as hard to search your website for the things consumers are likely to be looking for, it rewards you by ranking your content highly when people are looking for a certain term.
SEO is less complicated than you might think
SEO can seem scary, because when you start researching what is involved with it, you may come across a lot of highly technical terms that you may not know much about, such as “backlinks” “domain authority” “h1”, etc. Like most professional realms, self-proclaimed “experts” like to throw out these words to make unassuming consumers believe that this area is something that they can never know enough about to be useful and they should outsource this skill set at the soonest possible chance.
However, here at Flamingo, where love being our brands’ best kept secret, we’ll let you in on the fact that this is a misconception. In fact, SEO is much more about not doing the wrong things than it is worrying if you are doing the right things.
Avoid SEO no-no’s like these
- Having pages on your website with no content or “Coming soon.” It’s better to add those pages when they are complete.
- Checking your website on a mobile device to ensure everything is readable and working properly
- Break up long areas of text with headers, bold text, and bulleted lists (see what we’re doing here? 🙂 )
- Make sure your pages include at least one image
Ways to play the SEO game well
Think thoughtfully about what your customers will be looking for. Try Googling yourself or your business and see what comes up! But be realistic. For instance, Flamingo Consulting is one of hundreds of marketing agencies in Grand Rapids. We know better than to think we’ll be able to rank at the top of the list every time someone types in one of those key words. But we can rank for Alicia’s name, our own name, and some of our specialties, so we make those the things we prioritize in writing our website copy.
Also, simply having a Google Business page can catapult you to the top of page rankings, especially if your business has a brick-and-mortar location that can be seen on a map.
Need more help figuring out the SEO world, or would you like to have our team give you some advice? Contact us – we’d love to chat with you about how to make your website better!