My first car was a candy apple red VW Beetle. The seats were filled with hay and bad springs. Air conditioning? Nope! Just what the open windows brought you. No matter what complaints I had against that car, I loved it dearly. I’d spend my Saturday mornings fixing whatever had gone wrong. Things always went wrong. It wasn’t until I started having some major engine problems that I had to call in a friend whose mechanical skills far outweighed my own. In a matter of hours that baby was back on the road once more. On my own, I could have spent hours trying to fix her, or I could have taken her to a crooked mechanic, but I wanted to know what was going on and to help wherever I could. That’s why I called a friend.
All too often we trust what’s important to us to complete strangers and a sales speech that convinces us we need service. We just don’t realize until we’ve signed a contract that we need something more than we’re paying for.
Search engine optimization is more than adding some keywords in the back end of a site and hoping for the best. It’s far more than getting traffic to your site. Real SEO brings in qualified leads that will become customers. There are many companies out there, many SEO “experts” that will trump up your traffic through directory submissions and Pay Per Click advertising which can provide you with a false positive.
SEO takes a balance of conversation, commitment, and conversion. Your website needs to read like it has a purpose. Your content should have keywords placed organically into the conversation that should be engaging and inspiring potential customers. SEO takes commitment on the part of the business owner; Only you know your business best, you have to partner with an SEO Company so that your website is found by terms that you want it to be found under. It also takes commitment, by the business owners, to allow the SEO Company to do their own research. You might be surprised at the keywords and key phrases they come up with that will bring you results. Finally, SEO requires conversion. I can stand on the top of the Carnegie Library in the Downtown Eastside and throw $100,000 worth of loonies off the roof and I’ll gather quite a crowd…but how long can your budget keep that up? Organic search engine optimization means bringing the right traffic to your site 365 days a year. It means bringing potential customers to your business for the long haul, not just short-term statistics that make your SEO firm look good.
My needs have changed, over the years, once I could pack all my belongings into my little red Beetle and the world was mine. Our websites too were just fine when we first started out on the web. Things change. Now I have a family and it takes a 5-ton moving truck to move our stuff from place to place. Your website can’t rely on what worked for it a few years ago. As Bob Dylan once said ‘the times, they are a changin.’ Is your website in the care of a marketing company, or a partner that cares about your business goals more than their own? Is the phone ringing more often? Do you have more warm bodies in the door of your business? If not, call us at A&G Creative (www.agcreative.ca). We’d love to take you and your business to the next level.
Earl Buchan
Senior Web Manager