(Or Why “Content is King”)
Section 1: Why Organic Search Matters, And How to See Your Ranking Profile
I have encountered many small businesses that have a website and are assuming that it is doing some lead generation for them. When I probe further, it becomes clear that that thought is really just an assumption. Few if any businesses are truly tracking their digital leads to guide their strategy and gauge results, and on top of that few are even aware of their search rankings.
If you want to skip to the case study you can do that by clicking here. But this first section explains why I got the results I did and why content on your website is so important.
Knowing where you rank in search is important to determine whether you are capturing all the leads that are actively looking for you. Most websites that I inherit have the basic idea down, they have a website that is ranking for some terms, but often these terms are either branded, such as “Philadelphia Therapy Partners,” or informational, such as “How to deal with depression.”
When seeing these rankings, one may be excited that “My business is ranking for X terms!” The fact of the matter that neither of these search queries are economically useful. Think of the consumer psychology here.
When someone knows your branded business name and is searching it, they likely:
A. Have already encountered your business
B. (Or) Are searching you after seeing your ad elsewhere
When someone is searching for an informational term, they likely:
A. Are learning about their issue and researching if they need a solution (and so are not ready to buy)
B. (Or) Possibly comparing the solution categories for their products
Neither of these is the gold standard of the lead you want. Which is someone:
A. Who has not used your services before (i.e. a new lead)
B. Is actively looking for a solution to their problem (i.e. searching “marriage counselor near me”)
C. Is able to commit to your services (Is qualified i.e. someone who knows they need you to solve their problem, and can pay out of pocket)
So go ahead and think of what these terms may be for your business.
For example, a marriage counselor would like to show up in search for those gold standard queries. That means terms such as:
- “Marriage counselor near me”
- “Marriage counseling in (my city)”
- “Top marriage counselor in (my state)”
- “Discernment counseling” (searched from my city)
These are the gold standard terms for marriage therapy, and what I work to actively rank for. (See the results section for how I have performed for these terms).
DIY: Find your businesses keywords
Go ahead and brainstorm 4-5 terms related to your business.
Now that you have 4-5 of these high intent keywords, go ahead and google them. I have all kinds of fancy tools to do this myself and can compare rankings from multiple locations, but for the average business owner, here is a quick and simple trick to do that.
For example to check search results for acupuncture in Edina, MN you can use a URL like this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=acupuncture&near=edina+mn
(This includes your keyword in the “q=” parameter, and your location in the “near=” parameter.)
However, this can include results for people trying to learn about acupuncture (as seen in those results) so you can use “near me” to be more specific:
https://www.google.com/search?q=acupuncture+near+me&near=edina+mn
Are you performing well in the results? If not, it is likely because you are not prioritizing engaging content compared to your competitors, OR it is not optimized for search results. You must do both to see success. When it comes down to it, google ranks websites based on one question: “Do you have engaging, authoritative content?” And as a secondary question, “Can I, as Google, see that?”
In any case, my work gives google the answer: yes and yes! See my results below:
Section 2: A Case Study of Digital Marketing Success in Marriage Counseling
As I said in Section 1, my goal was to rank for terms related to “high intent” search queries. I laid those out above, so here are the results of that. This is after 3 months of SEO heavy work creating engaging content on the site and optimizing it properly for Google. Keep in mind that it will take an additional 3-6 month to see top 3 ranking results for these associated terms.
We can see some significant growth in rankings for this site, so let’s dig deeper into some specific terms. Specifically “marriage counseling” and “couples counseling.”
In Fig 2 and 3 we can see the sustained increase in search result rankings after implementing a strong content strategy. Now increased rankings and traffic alone don’t mean increased value, so let’s look at the increase in leads over that time.
Figure 4 proves that by increasing your rank profile in local results you also increase your inbound leads. By the way, these results wouldn’t be possible to track if you do not have lead tracking enabled on your site. (Read about how to set this up: here)
In conclusion, these results prove (if there was any doubt) the oft quoted phrase in my industry “Content is King.” Contact me if you want to learn more about how content can help your business.