SEO doesn't matter anymore!

There, I said it!  I don't really mean it though.  Well kind of.  Here's the reason I say it doesn't matter anymore.  Or maybe what I am trying to say is that it is mattering a less than before.  I'll show you what I mean and talk about some alternative things you can do.  I came up with this topic as I was searching the term "SEO" this morning.  I saw a lot of things come up, none of which pertained to natural search.  Instead of me describing it I will just show you.

As you can see there are 4 ads, there's a wikipedia result and then on the right there are a bunch of other things that look to be google oriented products and some other search terms you might be interested in and this doesn't even include a google business page and or map result that takes up a ton of space on many other searches.  See below on the search term "Boston Children's Museum"

  The first thing you see are profiles from a bunch of other museums as well.  Then you have a "branded" google ad that they are paying for in the adwords platform.  You do have the google business page showing on the right and some SEO results underneath the google ad.  You have to scroll down the page to find the first natural search result driven by traditional SEO methods.  Think about that.  Companies are paying thousands and thousands of dollars (to agencies) to show up naturally and now on many searches you are showing below the fold.  Which means you have to scroll down to see the results.  SEO is an ever changing landscape and there are so many things to focus on.  I am going to give you 4 things I would do today to help with your search results for your local business.

1.)  Set up a google business page.  If you look at the image above you can see the google business page showing up on the right hand side.  This is great exposure for your business and can be a huge drive of business for you.  It is free and easy to set up.  Click here to get started with one.  The other thing that you will want to do is post regularly on it and try to get people to review your business on it.  Both of those things will help to elevate you business profile.

2.)  Invest in review management.  Whether you are paying someone else to do it or you are doing it yourself, invest in review management software.  There are so many out there for you to choose from.  My two favorites are Broadly and Grade.us   Broadly is much more expensive but their software is a little more robust.  For the price Grade.us is the best.  I reviewed about 10 different platforms before choosing one.  The reason you want reviews is because they will help you in your natural rankings.  As you are getting more reviews on Facebook, Yelp and especially Google it will start to help your business show up.  It is also a great way to validate your work and more people will want to do business with you.

3.)  SEMrush-  SEO does not have to be difficult.  I must say my SEO game stepped up once I got an SEMrush account.  SEMrush is a software that helps you to hone in on things to fix with your website so search engines view it better, gives you a ton of competitor analysis so you can see how your competition is ranking so high and it will give you endless ideas and data to use to continually monitor and drive natural traffic to your website.  Anyone who is looking to do marketing online needs to have an account with them or something similar.

4.)  Start a twitter account.  See the pic below as to why.  Granted this is a branded search but the more space you can take up when people search your name the better.  Look at the space that the Twitter Feed takes up in the SERP.  This does a couple of things.  It shows that your company is social and relevant.  It occupies a large amount of real estate on the search engine results page preventing other organic results from creeping in.  It also just looks good. 

SEO is ever changing and still very important.  I wanted to highlight different things you can do to approach your SEO efforts.  If you are looking for a place to start you can use this free health checker on your website.  It will give you areas of your website to work on.  There are always going to be new techniques that you will need to incorporate to leverage natural search.  When it comes to competitive keywords that you want to show up for you might have to spend money on search engine marketing to show up.  Or just know that you will have to scroll down the page to be seen in natural results.  Showing up on the first page is still a very powerful and can result in a greta ROI.  It's just not as powerful as it used to be.