A lot of SEO advice that is published is based on the goal to generically getting more universal traffic. Many publishers are constantly battling for keyword phrases people search for to gain visitors to their site and sell advertising. This is all well and good but can be confusing for small business owners with local geographic markets. As Google and SEO have evolved it has become much more nuanced. In fact, you can view it as every search having its own individual set of ranking factors. Generic overall ranking factor studies are somewhat useless these days. When it comes down to what moves the needle, everything is relative to your competitors and your users, and you should focus on the things that make your users happier better than your direct competitors. That may be speed, types of content, ease of converting, and of course demonstration of expertise and experience in your industry.
What Should Matter to Small Businesses in 2023
At the end of the day, the most important thing for your small business is getting conversions. That may be phone calls, form fills, quote requests, or even online sales, but typically a blog post going viral and getting thousands of visits is not crucial to your business success. There are benefits of a blog post going viral, such as other websites linking to you and more exposure for your brand, but if you are basing business decisions on just traffic, you are likely aiming at the wrong target. This is why it is critical that small businesses are measuring the right conversions. The things that really matter to your business success. If you are basing success on just traffic, you are going to make the wrong decisions.
I push my clients to make sure we set up the right conversion in their metrics. I have seen many cases where traffic drops off, but conversions are going up. As a business owner, you may fire your SEO, or change tactics when you see a drop in traffic, but it may just be that an old blog post has aged out and national traffic that isn’t even real prospects has declined but your real market is growing. Sometimes conversions start to move to your Google Business profile as it intercepts traffic before it makes it to your site. If you don’t have the whole story you can make some bad mistakes and cost yourself a lot of digital marketing success.
Get on the Correct Digital Marketing Path in 2023
I see so many small businesses that don’t actually measure their true conversions. If nothing else, heading into 2023, at least set up your conversions to properly track so you can make decisions on the right information. The bottom line is leads or sales and not traffic. Don’t make the mistake of investing in chasing the wrong goals. As Google continues to evolve and get more nuanced you may find yourself further and further from the right path. For example, in a local market, it is good to have content that specifically speaks to your geographic market. Mentioning the town names in your informational blog posts that support your service pages. However, this may not be ideal for a national audience. It may actually subtract from a national strategy, but that doesn’t matter to you. A visitor from your county is 100x more valuable to you than a visitor across the country that can’t use your services. Give yourself the right information to focus on the right prize. If you need help with this, give us a call.
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