The traffic stats look good, but there’s nothing on the sales calendar. Perhaps the site draws visitors who are seeking advice and have no intention of purchasing. Or perhaps it’s attracting the right type of visitor, but they’re unable to determine if you serve their geographic area or undertake their project type.
To be effective, SEO for businesses must address both challenges. Search engine optimization assists search engines in understanding your website and aids individuals in discovering it via non-paid search engine results. The value of SEO to a business depends on what occurs once someone finds your site. Google’s SEO Starter Guide introduces the basics of how this discovery process works.
The key issue for the owner is: where should I invest my time and resources so that more potential customers end up on the right landing page and then proceed to perform a valuable action? Begin by identifying your business objectives.
Build Your SEO Strategy Around Work You Want to Win
Before diving into keyword research, decide which products or services you want to focus on growing. Tie these goals to your overall digital marketing strategy so that your SEO efforts align with the priorities of your sales team. Think about margin, capacity, customer fit, and where you can realistically provide value. A highly searched service might not be the best priority if your company is at capacity or if it's not very profitable.
For example, a hypothetical commercial cleaning company may prefer recurring office contracts over sporadic residential cleanings. It should communicate this on its website. An article about "How to Clean Your Office" might bring in traffic, but won't necessarily lead to a single desired contract.
Create a short summary for each priority offer:
- Who is the target buyer and why are they searching for it?
- What makes an opportunity a good fit for your business?
- What areas do you service? Are there specific requirements?
- What should the user do next? Request a quote, book a consultation, or purchase?
Give the person optimizing the site for SEO access to this information. Otherwise, they're trying to identify which opportunities are worth pursuing without knowing which ones actually apply to your business. Update these priorities if your capacity, pricing, or services change.
Choose Keywords That Match a Customer's Decision
It’s much more useful to align a search query with an intended action. A person wanting to know how frequently they should clean their offices is going to want a very different answer than a facility manager comparing commercial cleaning companies in Miami. Both searches are perfectly valid, but they shouldn’t automatically lead to the same page.
Match the Page to the Search Intent
An explanatory query may suit a blog post or guide, while someone comparing providers may need a service page with scope, qualifications and contact details. The right format depends on the actual question and the results people see. A question looking for a comparison between various options belongs on a resource page that helps them navigate trade-offs.
Check out the search engine results for a potential target keyword. Are the results local businesses, category listings, blog posts, or comparison pages? It’s a strong indicator of what a user expects to see when they type in that search term. Can your business provide a page that meets that expectation while delivering additional value?
Finally, your sales conversations can serve as a secondary resource. Your customers may talk about their problems differently than your staff. Things like questions about frequency, eligibility, pricing factors, and types of work included can be prime candidates for a blog post or guide that might not come up through a keyword planner.
Weigh Commercial Fit Alongside Search Volume
For smaller businesses with fewer resources, a low-volume keyword is still worth going after if it closely lines up with a product or service. A high-volume keyword may bring in college kids, job seekers, or someone completely outside of your market. Instead of creating several different pages for the same offering, consolidate similar keywords onto one well-crafted page. If you already have a good service page, update it. You’ll have a stronger destination for links from other pieces of content and visitors will enjoy a more cohesive experience.
Use On-Page SEO to Make Important Pages Useful
Imagine opening your highest-priority service page as if you’ve never heard of your business before. Could you figure out what the page is about, who it’s for, and what you should do next, all without going through the site navigation?
On-page SEO covers descriptive title tags, clear headings, and internal links that provide readers with more information on related topics. Each landing page should have its own unique meta description that describes what visitors will find there. Keywords that accurately describe the service should be used in these areas as well.
All of these things can be helpful, but they are only truly effective if the actual landing page itself answers common buyer questions. For a service-based business, those questions could be what services you offer, how they impact the scope of work, or what happens once you get an inquiry. If you don’t publish a flat rate for your service, you should still share what information a client needs to give you to prepare an accurate quote. That way, potential customers can decide whether they want to bother filling out your contact form.
Finally, include proof that you can back up what you claim to offer. If you worked on a specific type of project, mention the specifics. Take and share your own photos rather than generic stock images. List certifications and accreditations you hold accurately and honestly. Include reviews that you have permission to share. Don’t say something generic that could apply to any other business.
You need a solid content strategy to help people answer a question related to your service. A post about preparing your office space to accommodate an overnight cleaning team can easily point users toward your commercial cleaning services page. An unrelated trending topic won’t do as much, even if it brings in traffic. Google's people-first content guidelines stress creating useful, original content over content created just to drive traffic.
Use a Technical SEO Audit to Find Access Problems
But there’s only so much you can do about content if an important page isn’t available. A technical SEO audit checks whether the pages you’d like to show up in search results can be found and understood by search engines. It can uncover issues with SEO that keep a valuable page out of the index. Have someone from your team dig into any missing high-priority pages, broken links, blocks to indexing that were inadvertently added, or updates made during a redesign. Google’s developer guidance explains how to use URL Inspection to view what Google can see. The site owner doesn’t need to resolve every technical challenge themselves, but they should know which commercial pages are impacted and who is responsible for resolving the problem.
Next, put the site through its paces as a user on a mobile phone. Click on a service page, dial the phone number, complete the contact form and verify that the form lands where it should. Is the text easy to read? Are large photos and pop-ups getting in the way?
Each set of tests is useful for a different reason. Allowing search engines to access the page aids in its discovery; making sure the form works helps the potential customer contact you. One test cannot stand in for the other.
Prioritize tasks based on their potential impact on the business. A broken request-for-quote form on a popular service page takes precedence over a visual inconsistency on an old blog post with little relevance to current sales.
Use Local SEO Where Location Affects the Sale
For a local company, information about service areas can be helpful. It helps local searchers determine whether you can help them. Ensure that your business information is accurate on your site and on your Google Business Profile, if your business is eligible. Choose the appropriate categories, update your business hours, and ensure that visitors can quickly see what you offer.
Local search ranking is determined by "relevance, distance, and popularity," according to Google. Quality business listings and customer reviews may contribute to local rankings, but they cannot replace the importance of distance. Read more in Google’s advice on local ranking factors.
Location pages need to address whether you serve the area in question. If you serve Miami, or South Florida broadly, there might be variations worth explaining, such as services offered, or availability. Do not create fake locations, or create duplicate location pages with only the city name changed.
For an online store shipping nationwide, location may play a smaller role in purchase decisions, while product details, shipping and return policies, or category structure could deserve more attention. Determine the best approach based on how customers shop from your website.
Build Relevant Backlinks Through Useful Work
Even valuable content needs opportunities to get noticed. There are numerous sources for word-of-mouth referrals of your business or citations of your content. Look to industry-specific groups, vendors, trade publications, and personal associations as avenues for getting a mention. A unique asset, whether it's a detailed account of a recent project or a simple summary of a procedure your employees have perfected, can serve as a basis for trust. Give others a useful reason to link to you that goes beyond your desire to be linked.
Be careful of firms that promise you hundreds of "backlinks" in exchange for money. Google has made it clear that buying links to increase the ranking of your site in the results of its searches constitutes a violation of its spam policies. If you choose to engage the services of an SEO firm, ask it to describe in detail the ways it obtains links and where those links come from. Ask for a closer review if you find yourself with a steadily increasing number of links from web pages that seem to have nothing to do with your audience.
Choose SEO Metrics That Connect Traffic to Revenue
Set a baseline first. Which pages get organic traffic? Which inquiries are qualified leads? Which leads become paying customers? If you don’t know your baseline, more visits might just mean more junk.
Google Search Console shows search clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and other performance metrics. Reviewing search queries and top landing pages will give you insight into your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and how users find your site. These figures don’t tell you which inquiries became paying customers, though. See Google’s documentation on the performance report for details on the search metrics.
Tie in your website reporting with your leads and sales data as best you can. For a small team, this could start with a simple, standardized spreadsheet; for a larger company, a CRM. Log source, type of service requested, lead qualification status, and outcome. Ensure you differentiate between junk, existing customers, and new sales. Have the sales contact and person managing SEO review new leads together every week so that bad leads inform future page edits.
Work Through the Numbers Without Confusing Revenue With Profit
Consider this made-up scenario, not actual or projected GOA-TECH results: Your service site gets 1,000 organic web visits per month. Those visits result in 30 inquiries, 12 of which qualify for sales. Three of those become paying customers at $3,000 each. The visit-to-inquiry conversion rate is 3%, and only 12 inquiries meet the sales criteria. The three sales produce $9,000 in revenue associated with those visits. It does not mean you had $9,000 in profit. You have delivery and marketing costs to consider. Someone else’s effort or another channel may also have played a role in generating a sale. And maybe that customer read one of your articles, left, got referred by someone else, and then came back a month later.
The hypothetical above helps you identify your next step. Are your inquiries mostly unqualified? Check your keywords and page copy. Do you get qualified leads but fail to convert? Look at your offer, how fast you respond, and how you sell. Are you getting no inbound inquiries? Make sure your content is what people are looking for, and that your site makes it easy to reach out.
Look at results over the length of your sales cycle. If it takes longer than a month to turn a lead into a paying customer, the full impact of a campaign won’t be apparent until well after the initial search. During seasonal business cycles, compare results during similar periods before crediting every change in results to SEO.
Set a Practical First 90 Days of SEO Work
90 days is not a timeframe to hit a revenue target. SEO results can move at different speeds, and the competitive landscape can shift. Google’s advice on hiring an SEO recommends that you give some thought to process, outcomes and experience.
Month one is about selecting the priority offers, putting a reporting system in place, and looking at the pages and routes to contact that underpin those offers. Someone needs to take the lead in making necessary improvements. An audit is only helpful if the recommendations lead to decisions and actions.
Month two is about optimizing key existing pages and creating relevant supporting content to address an actual customer question that isn’t answered elsewhere. Make sure that you keep a record of what was done and when so that later reporting has context.
In month three, evaluate initial search visibility, inquiries and lead quality to determine what to do next based on the data. That could be extending a successful subject area, defining a service offering more clearly, or resolving a technical issue. One slow month doesn’t equate to failure, nor does one month with a lot of traffic equate to success.
If you’re bringing in an SEO vendor, find out who will make website changes, what reporting will look like, and what you’ll need to provide. Evaluate proposals based on the work required to meet your priorities, not the number of blog posts or keywords promised. SEO tools can assist with research and tracking, but inquire about how those insights will be translated into action. Any good SEO vendor should be able to answer that question.
Give Your SEO Investment a Clear Business Purpose
Start with one commercially important service. Trace it through from search to sale, noting the page, the question the customer needs answered before purchasing the service, the next step after that question is answered, and who is responsible for following up on that step. This will provide a real-world context in which to discuss SEO.
GOA-TECH offers SEO services such as website analysis, content optimization and strategy, technical site optimization, link building and monitoring and reporting. These all deal with distinct elements of a business’ online presence and web improvement over time.
Request a free consultation from GOA-TECH to discuss your goals, the services you wish to promote and what you know about your inquiries and sales. The more specifically you can identify a desired customer, the better.
