Nov
10
2016
Know Who Your Customers Are
If you rank high on Google, it will make your business. Poor search rankings can break it. The #1 search results garners about 6 times more traffic than the #5 spot. To get your Alaskan business to the top of search results, otherwise known as search engine optimization (SEO), you need to do 3 things consistently. The best part about this for Alaska is that the importance of SEO in Alaska is still very new - that is, SEO competition is low.
Google's main goal is to connect peoples' questions to the most relevant answers. Getting to the top of search results means knowing who your customers are and what they are searching for. It's the basis of an effective internet marketing plan. When we talk about "who your customers are," we are talking about several personas that define your customers' main demographics, personal interests, and needs. It means answering questions like:
- What is the average age and location of my customers?
- What style of content are my customers interested in (i.e., educational, funny, stylistic, sentimental, etc.)?
- What are my customers' hobbies and political attitudes?
And let's be perfectly honest, "customer personas," which is the common, bonafide internet marketing and inbound marketing idea that is central to modern marketing, is the nice way of saying "customer profiling." You need to know who to target with your pictures, videos, social media sharing, etc., otherwise you are just wasting your time.
Know Customers' Keyword Phrases
By "targeting" we mean that you need to know your customers: keyword phrases. Keyword phrases are simply the phrases you use to search for things. Fishing lodges, for example, would probably want to naturally include phrases on their social media, blog, and website like, "best Alaskan fishing charter," or, "Alaskan guided fishing trip." Each businesses' key word phrases will differ depending on who their customers are, but naturally using keyword phrases and similar variants will drastically increase search rankings on Google and other search engines.
The modus operandi for many business is that if they take some pictures, are fairly active on social media, have a nice website, and so on, that people would flock to their business. It's incredibly wishful thinking. The truth is that everything you do on the web is only as good as your ability to put it in front of the relevant people. The better you do that, the higher you will rank.
Just take check out “Alaskan lodges” on Google. The first few results have:
Beyond the first three or four results, you will notice a dramatic drop in the above bullet points, among other things.
You time and/or extra resources
Believe me, doing all of the things that Google says we should do online takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. Making sure images, page names, URLs, titles, etc. are all "optimized." Researching, creating, and incorporating keywords based on customer history and what the competition is doing. Writing blogs to promote the keywords. Thinking about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and posting. Updating your Alaskan website design. Taking pictures. Driving traffic.
These things and much more. It can be a headache. And the basic fact is most businesses simply don’t have the time or energy to do it because, you know, because they are busy running their businesses. Which leaves most businesses with three options:
- $ DIY internet marketing, which makes many concessions to maximize rankings for only a couple of keywords and maintain an acceptable level of activity on social media, blogging, website updates, etc.
- $$ Internet marketing company, The most cost-effective/quality option that can give you anything from a nice content management base and a lot of guidance in conjunction with your DIY marketing, or fully comprehensive online content management/promotion.
- $$$ In-house hiring, this would mean hiring an employee to take care of all of your marketing. The most expensive option, but would mean having an employee solely dedicated to managing your content.