At GOA-TECH we offer SEO services including site audit, content optimization, technical SEO fixes, link building and ongoing monitoring and improvements.
You can see increased traffic without an increase in qualified leads.
Your site may rank well for search terms irrelevant to your sales team. More traffic may also fail to overcome a confusing service page that leaves prospective customers wondering about next steps. An effective SEO strategy aligns what customers are looking for, a relevant page answering their questions and a clear next step.
This may mean improving content, fixing technical issues or improving visibility in search. Where to focus depends on what’s holding your site back. We hope this guide will help you understand the different aspects of search engine optimization and allow you to ask more informed questions as you develop a strategy.
Set SEO Goals Around the Business You Want
If your goal is simply “more traffic” then you’re not going to fully understand whether your marketing efforts are aligned with your business. You need to know how to measure success and you need to know who’s the right fit for your business before you’ll understand your marketing reports.
What is it about your business you want to grow?
A contractor may want more calls for a particular service, a practice may want patients to understand an appointment type, and a store may want shoppers to find the right product category.
Different businesses need to evaluate their marketing efforts in different ways, beyond a traffic chart. For example:
- What is the best search topic for your business? (It could be the topic with low search volume, if it gets you in front of people that match your needs.)
- What search topic is bad? (It could be a popular topic, if it gets you in front of people out of your service area, and you may spend time answering calls, but you won’t get new customers because of them.)
Which outcomes matter to your business: a completed inquiry form, a particular kind of phone call or a purchase? How will you track those outcomes, and who will evaluate whether they are the right fit?
Without knowing what those questions mean to your business, a chart or a ranking report isn’t going to give you the whole picture.
Use Keyword Research to Understand Search Intent
Keyword research starts with search intent. Search terms, in and of themselves, are not a useful way to build a website. What is important is what people mean when they use them. When someone searches “how to diagnose if my roof is leaking” they may be looking for a useful article, explaining the most common causes and what they look like. When someone searches “roof repair in my city” they may be looking for a company near them that fixes roofs.
Look at the search engine results pages. You don’t need to duplicate them, but they will give you a hint about what sort of answer they’re looking for. Is it an article? A business? A video?
How does your website answer these questions and what happens next? If a searcher has read a blog post, is there somewhere else on your site that would make sense for them to go next? Perhaps, in the example above, the article about leaks could link to a service page for roof inspections.
If you already have several pages making the exact same claim, saying the same things, neither offering something the other doesn’t, you don’t need to write another. You need to step back and figure out what you need each page to accomplish. And if there’s a question your business should be answering that it isn’t, that’s more important than your next blog post.
Your team has an advantage over SEO tools. They can look at their own experiences answering calls, emails and other direct interactions with customers to understand how people search and what questions they have and where they get confused. Your subject matter experts know what customers are confused about: the project schedule, their qualifications for a particular program, how to prepare their home.
Fix Technical SEO Problems That Block Useful Pages
Technical issues can be a tough hurdle to decipher. A well-written article that is inaccessible to Google or that visitors are unable to properly navigate won’t achieve its intended purpose.
Technical SEO addresses SEO issues and user experience by fixing errors that prevent Google or users from accessing or using your site. After SEO audits, the priority is to identify where errors may be impacting your most valuable pages first.
- Can Google access these commercially important pages from standard navigation?
- Do these commercially important pages load fast on mobile?
- Are these commercially important pages displaying text clearly without intrusive interstitials or confusing the user?
- Are there broken links on commercially important pages that are taking the visitor off course?
Google’s SEO Starter Guide explains the basics of helping search engines find and understand content. No technical adjustment guarantees a first-place ranking.
Knowing what to prioritize isn’t just exporting a list of technical warnings, it’s understanding what each warning means, where those URLs are, and the potential business impact those fixes could have. Then, it’s determining whether the issue is site-wide or impacting a small, low-traffic URL.
A solid technical SEO fix prioritization strategy is taking into account the actual impact and the resources it would take to implement the fix.
As your web design and development partner, GOA-TECH can manage technical changes as they relate to SEO. Changes to a site, like a new design or navigation, booking system installation, etc., can affect conversion from search to action. A comprehensive implementation strategy requires that technical, marketing, and web team members are aligned on the task and that someone owns the project post-launch to make sure top priority pages and user actions are still accessible and functioning.
Build SEO Content That Helps Someone Decide
Review with your team
Ask a member of your team who is customer facing to read the page. Can they imagine when the page could confuse a caller? Can they imagine when they'd need to re-explain something you're claiming on the page? What questions do customers regularly ask that aren't answered? This review helps align content with your business.
Decide the purpose
Start with the question the page will answer. Service pages should describe what service you offer, who it suits, how it works and what you do next. Educational articles help readers understand an issue, you may not need many calls to action.
Be specific
Being specific helps readers. Tell readers what input you need from them, what choices they might make, any limitations to how you provide the service, etc. Where you include example projects or products, show what you actually do, as realistically as possible. If your example is a hypothetical, rather than a completed project, say so.
Audit before commission
Before you commission new content, check what you already have. In many cases, you can tweak and optimise pages by fixing broken links, updating service descriptions and highlighting answers to commonly asked questions. Sometimes optimising means making changes and removing words, not adding them. Content optimization should make the answer easier to find.
Make On-Page SEO Clear and Consistent
The page title and main heading should focus on one theme, and support this theme through the page’s additional headings and surrounding text. Write these elements in the same way your customer would.
In addition, an important page should have a descriptive title that uses its primary keyword naturally. This is not a place for keyword variations. Google’s title link guidance explains that it uses various elements on your page to construct the search engine title, so you are just trying to influence what Google displays.
Describe what your page offers with the meta description. Your target customer will use this information to determine if your search result is the correct page. Google may display a different snippet, but your description should give clear expectations without making unfounded promises.
If your page is a guide or service, internal linking can connect other pages on your website to provide useful information or answers to additional questions. Make sure to use link text that is descriptive enough to tell the reader where they are going. Do not add links just to reach some arbitrary number. This will just make it harder to use your page.
Support Local Search With Accurate Business Information
You can’t buy local ranking from Google. Google describes local ranking in terms of relevance, distance and prominence. Distance depends on where the searcher is looking.
That means the remaining two elements, relevance and prominence, are the most important things to focus on.
Local Web Pages Should Provide Useful, Accurate Information
Describe services performed in that area on local pages. Don’t just change the city name in a boilerplate page. Visitors will find this less trustworthy. Don’t pretend you have an office somewhere you don’t actually have one. Don’t indicate you serve a location when you do not.
Keep Your Business Profiles Updated
Make sure all the information in your profile (phone number, hours, category, contact information, etc) is accurate. It should reflect what a searcher will experience. Inaccurate business information is not just a search issue, it’s a customer service issue. An incorrect phone number, or out-of-date holiday hours will have a negative effect on your business. Have a process in place where changes are made to your business profile, and someone is responsible for telling the webmaster or person in charge. See Google’s local ranking guidance.
Treat Backlinks as Relationships and References
GOA-TECH works to secure links from reputable sources that are relevant to a company's industry. But the rationale behind a link is what makes all the difference. A link earned from a related industry resource, an informative article or a professional relationship is a good link. Buying links primarily to manipulate rankings can violate Google’s spam policies.
Where will you be seeking links? Why would those people care about it? What content is the basis for that link?
Asking these questions when working with an SEO agency on link building reveals more than you will ever know by asking how many backlinks you will get per month.
When vetting an agency or reviewing an SEO proposal: ask them how they plan to document this work and how they incorporate link building into their overall digital marketing strategy for your company.
The best contribution you can make is the most substantive. It might be a how-to on a complicated process, it might be access to some original materials that you own the rights to or it might simply be the go-to answer to a common question in your industry. The best content is rooted in some real expertise, not just anything you might claim to be true.
Keep AI Search in Perspective
If you've been using generative AI to help create copy for your business site, keep in mind that while the writing may sound great, it could be inaccurate, promising things or describing your offerings in a way that is not representative of your actual business. Be sure you're fact-checking before you publish.
Ask vendors some questions before paying for their service
Some vendors are also touting special optimizations to guarantee your presence in AI search results. While Google does offer AI Mode and AI Overviews, the search engine's documentation has guidance for AI features, specifically noting that there are no additional requirements to be a part of AI Mode or AI Overviews. You need pages that:
- Are indexed in Google Search
- Meet eligibility guidelines for showing in snippets
- Have accurate content.
Even when all requirements are met, Google states that your website may not be featured in AI answers. If anyone tells you that adding a special file or markup to your website will ensure you show up in AI answers, ask how that improves your site for users and ask for a way to verify the results.
Remember: The need for accurate, helpful, well-written content is still very real. Describing your goods and services accurately and providing good, relevant examples and evidence is always useful.
Measure SEO Efforts and Choose the Next Priority
A good report should help you understand whether your changes led to particular outcomes. For example, if you update particular pages, how are trends in related organic search traffic? Once you have a sale or inquiry, did it help?
It is critical to check with your sales team to confirm whether an inquiry is a viable opportunity for your business. Analytics alone may not tell you whether the inquiry is a good fit.
What about Google Search Console? How do you use the data provided? If a page has many impressions and few visits, you may want to explore why that is the case. How relevant is the search snippet to the user's query? If a page gets many visits, but few conversions, it is time to explore how you are offering the page, how the content is clear, how the call to action works. These observations will not tell you all there is to know, but they can be a starting point.
Likewise website analytics provides you with information about user behavior once they arrive.
The above items are important because you need to know what works and what doesn't. To know, you need a plan. Keep a record of your changes to the website, and then give it some time to perform. There's often too much change based on the whims of rankings.
Seasonality, competitor actions and algorithm updates will all influence your website's performance. Focus on trends and outcomes that help your business.
Contact GOA-TECH to discuss your SEO plan. What are the most important services you offer? What clients do you want to attract? Where is the website not performing well? These are all important topics to discuss to prioritize changes. A good plan should explain what will change next and the rationale. It should also outline how success will be measured.
