Where to Start?

Firstly you need to be completely sure about what you are trying to accomplish with your SEO strategy and where. For example, a website selling flower arrangements in Austin TX is not the same as having a statewide eCommerce operation focusing on smartphone accessories. Also, what is your ultimate marketing goal here, is it funneling traffic to your website or your storefront? All these need to be taken into account and well thought out.

Once you figure out what is it that you need it is time to get working on the SEO strategy itself for example we will try to develop a strategy for an imaginary florist with a storefront in Austin Texas and our goal is going to be twofold, we will be funneling traffic to the website and promoting the storefront itself.

First Steps

The first step in any SEO strategy development is keyword research, so go into the keyword planner, select the city/location and start researching, since we are going local don’t forget to throw those into the mix, I would strongly suggest you do a search check for each of your finds to figure out the competition and the difficulty you might have in ranking.

While you are checking that, make sure to check out the local SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) you can do that by going to Google.com and just typing in “Florists Austin TX” (that will tell Google to retrieve local results for Austin, Texas regardless of your actual location) or you can go up a level and use a VPN that has a server in your location for 100% precise results, or best of all just be in the location that you are looking at.

If you have the budget there’s also a Keyword Explorer tool in Ahref’s which can be a real lifesaver for finding easy keyword opportunities giving you an estimate of the competition and providing you with a link count to reach a specific SERP (although I wouldn’t base my entire strategy around it)

OK so by this point you should have a nice bit of information and a set of keywords you wish to shoot for.

Making it Work

Whatever those keywords might be you have a number of options, but the one I would always recommend to clients would be one that uses and capitalizes on your strengths. So as a florist you are bound to have lots of images of flowers, these can be very well leveraged on social media (and social signals are an ever-growing ranking signal for Google). As a brick-and-mortar business, you have scores of local directories you can get a backlink from, the list goes on and on, but always remember every business has it’s strengths the trick is to capitalize on them.

Whatever you do, think first, I can’t tell you how many times I have seen businesses trying to build off of their weaknesses instead, small town florists going for nationwide press releases, large B2B clients trying to fight for “retail only” keywords out of prestige or even eCommerce websites trying to get links by offering bribes to bloggers (that’s a big Google no-no) en-masse.

The point is that a successful SEO strategy is always exactly that a strategy, a strategy that needs to make sense or else your efforts will be hurting you much more than they would be helping you.

Maybe this step checklist might be of some service in developing your own SEO strategy

Figure out what you want to do (online leads, calls, direct sales, etc…)
Find what you want to rank for (keeping in mind what you’re trying to accomplish)
Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses and choose your approach accordingly
Implement

It’s as simple as that!

There are a thousand and one mistakes you can make managing your Google Ads campaigns but some are repeated over and over and over again so make sure you are not throwing money away on these three Google Ads mistakes.

Search and display select campaigns

1.Oh boy, talk about apples and oranges, actually talk about mixing things that don’t mix. Setting a campaign to search and display select is usually the default setting for new Google Ads campaigns (shame on you Google) and is a surefire way for you to pretty much waste your advertising budget and not get very good data in return. These campaigns will display text ads (meant for search originally) on the Google Display Network based on the keywords you selected. This is a setup that seldom works well and is primarily intended to provide new advertisers with a steady stream of inbound clicks and Google with a steady stream of profit. Do yourself a favor always split your display and search campaigns and optimize your ad and creative for the specifics of each network.

Not tracking conversions

2. OK this is one of the most common ways you are throwing money away. How much are conversions worth to you, how often do they happen, and how is it affecting your business? These are all questions that can’t really be answered without conversion tracking and if you already decided to invest time and money into a Google Ads campaign, go that extra mile and splash out just a little more for a developer to help you with conversion tracking or import your conversions from Google Analytics.

Not using negative keywords

3. Yep these can be negative too (these are the keywords that you don’t want to appear for your searches) there are a lot of lists online and based on your niche everybody’s favorite contender is usually “Free”

So there you have it, the three most common ways you are throwing money away on Google Ads. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to make certain your campaigns are optimized and up to date, get in touch and we will make sure you never again throw a dime without getting something in return.

How to Develop a Successful SEO Strategy