When it comes to digital marketing, effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an absolute must. In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is the practice of refining a website or piece of online content to get a search engine (such as Google or Bing) to recommend that content to the people you want to reach.
Because strong Search Engine Optimization is reliant on the audience you’re trying to reach, the way SEO manifests will differ for everybody. That means the first step to effective SEO is defining your goals, target audience, and the type of business you’d like to conduct with that audience.
Here at Blue Fire Media, we specialize in pairing businesses and other organizations with their target audience by surgically applying SEO practices based on your goals. In today’s blog post, we’ll be discussing how Search Engine Optimization can revitalize your business with an infusion of new customers.
Targeting a Specific Location
One of the first things we seek to do with our SEO is home in on a target based on location. While we do this for the obvious reason that a Kalamazoo-based retailer likely isn’t trying to market to the Honolulu audience, there’s an equally important factor at work.
National brands such as Walmart, Home Depot, or Petco have immense budgets for digital marketing and Search Engine Optimization and in-house marketing teams that work around the clock to fight over search queries as simple as “grocery store,” “buy tools,” and “pet supplies.” As a result, you’re likely to see companies like Walmart, Home Depot, and Petco near the top of Google when you conduct these searches (go ahead and try it, yourself!).
If you were to start up a local pet supply store, you’d be competing with a company like Petco’s marketing budget, team, and existing marketing and SEO infrastructure. It wouldn’t be hopeless to try and wrest control of a search term like “pet supplies” from Petco, per se, but it would take a long time and at least an equal amount of resources that Petco uses.
Instead, we at Blue Fire Media take the step to optimize our SEO to target specific areas that your business operates in or markets toward. Where Petco focuses their resources on being the first result in a national search for pet supplies, they simply don’t have the resources to target individual cities—the amount of work it would take to corner the market in every city would be almost incalculable.
We capitalize on this chink in companies like Petco’s armor by focusing on geography. By instead optimizing for terms such as “pet supplies Kalamazoo,” small businesses with otherwise very little media presence can compete for space at the top of the Google results page even against companies like Petco, Home Depot, or Walmart.
Cornering Your Market
Now that we’ve used geography to put you in contention even with the biggest fish in the pond, we take time to work with you in establishing which goods and services you excel at in particular. By further specifying the type of business you do, people who search Google for a service like yours are more likely to convert to a sale. Think about it like this: if you wanted to buy dog food, you might just search “dog food” in Google and find Petco. However, when a potential customer looking for a certain type of dog food searches “high protein dog food Kalamazoo,” the more specific keyword (what we in the biz call “long-tail keywords”) has almost no competition and a high conversion rate, meaning you’re targeting an audience that is more likely to pick out your voice in the crowd and take the steps to make a purchase.
Are you interested in flushing your company with new business? If so, contact us at Blue Fire Media today to get your voice heard.
