Ever heard Jeff Bezos’s quote? “One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature.”
Sounds kinda like what we hear when customers complain about not getting rocket-speed SEO 😁 However, that type of feedback always results in one thing – we step back to work on our delivery and improve our service!
Check out this important conversation with Michael Stearns of Ascend Digital Agency now:
Let’s talk about all the different experimental ways we’ve tried to speed things up – both successful and otherwise (from a general perspective) – content, links, technical changes that improve the website, meta descriptions, and others. All those deliverables have to be going on continuously, there has to be work happening, and the not-so-sweet one – SEO IS SLOW, TIME HAS TO PASS!
Like a chef at work, nothing stops him from putting all the ingredients together in 10 minutes. But to get his desired results, there needs to be time for things to cook. The time factor 🕒 is a big one in the equation of successful SEO. Let’s dive in!🚀
The All-Time King called “Content”
You’ve probably heard it repeatedly, “Content is King.” Everyone knows the importance of good content. By uploading answer-providing content, you stand a better chance of getting your content noticed and ranked by Google. If there was one lever SEO companies could crank to make SEO go faster, it’d be content velocity.
Recently, there’s been an increased use of Jasper to spin content through AI. No qualms with that, but many times, you’d have to spend more time editing the content. We’ve tried experimenting with Jasper for fun; created about 15 articles in about two hours. One of them did rank but it dropped after 10 or 15 minutes 😑
So the ranking was probably due to the editing we put in – quality images, videos, etc. Ultimately, guess what we found? People want relatable content! Your audience must read your content and WANT to stay or come back for more answers.
Nothing bad with experimenting with different techniques but overall, you’ve got to ensure that it appeals to the actual humans that come to your website. Otherwise, you might be a little stuck with results.
Explore Different SEO Techniques
A problem with SEO is that no “Almighty Formula” exists to solve your problem. Imputing consistent innovation and testing technology that could make things more efficient, improving your deliverables, and trying to make an impact more quickly are traits that’d help to keep your company at the top of search results.
Of course, some of your techniques will fail, and you’ll learn a lesson or two, but there are two things that’ll make your time and efforts worth it:
- SEO’s Compounding Effect📈: It’s the one thing that makes SEO all-time relevant. Starting with about two customers a month with SEO, in a year and a half or two years, you get more leads and closed deals and continue going higher and compounding in that fashion.
- SEO’S Measurability📏: With traditional advertising through TV, radio, and billboards, you can’t necessarily quantify how many people your campaign efforts are reaching. But not so with digital marketing efforts like SEO. Here, you know how many people will see your content, how many people your company is presented to, and those engaging with it.
Platform-based Content
You also don’t want to interrupt people online with your ads; it’s more seamless to flow along in the direction of people’s reason for using a platform. Take Facebook and Instagram, for example; most folks go there to socialize and have fun, so fun-based skits and memes do better on such platforms.
With serious “businessy” ads popping up their way, you might get some attention, but it generally doesn’t fit into the direction of their thoughts at that moment. Try tailoring your messaging to the platform you are on, and you’ll find it to be worth the effort.
Buying Backlinks🔗
Buying backlinks is another way to boost your SEO. But as much as we love this strategy, we’ve found backlinking not as powerful as it used to be. The most powerful backlinks you’d see are the expensive ones. So if you want to speed things up, it’ll cost you more.
Even if, during a consultation, a client says, “I have an unlimited budget, and I need to speed things up,” we’ll probably have them purchase niche guest posts and edits while spending a majority of their budget on additional content.
It’s all about the recipe and the combination of the different factors to work well. Because it’s hard to tell precisely which aspect makes the difference in ranking. And it won’t do you any good if you have many excellent links but bad content reposted from other websites.
Creative Keyword Insertion
When it comes to keywords, many people jump all in and get heavy-handed with them. It’s more common among younger SEOs and those with little understanding of the strategy. The actual persuasiveness of your business’ website matters a lot more than keywords.
Of course, you want to rank; but you also need that website to be persuasive. Use the keywords but also watch for the over-optimization syndrome. You want your website’s headlines to sound human and to be pain or persuasion-oriented rather than just focused on beating an algorithm.
Afterward, you can be creative and subtly intermix the keywords between sentences. Sales guys understand this concept better; knowing keywords won’t attract customers and sell the deals.
Building Relationships with Your Community🫂
This talks about going a step further and having conversations with other companies that help websites exchange local backlinks, or you can create something like a community page on your website.
Show your visitors that you care about them by broadcasting this small collection of local businesses on your website and creating something like a network. Funny how it may not matter directly for SEO, but it can make a huge difference in establishing your brand’s credibility within your community.
Creativity!
Ultimately, the power to make more leads happen is directly related to your ingenuity! There are several other creative ways to progress your business while waiting for success with SEO. You can:
- Network with other professionals,
- Refer partners,
- Maximize social media to increase referrals (Facebook groups, for example),
- Break down a pillar piece of content into short, easily chewable pieces – videos into short blog posts, clips into reels, anything!
- Blog! Blogging also helps to increase the visibility of your website,
- And all the work doesn’t need to happen in your office! Outsource a couple of things and enjoy some fresh air! 😁
Think about all the roofing FAQs you’ve gotten over the last ten to twenty years and provide answers to them. Or take a walk around your neighborhood, do a two-minute recording of yourself answering a pertinent question, and upload it to youtube – simple stuff! Or turn on the dictation on your phone and start talking through your process of how you do things.
It might not necessarily rank you, but that video or blog post will help to nurture leads and closes; plus, you can send them out later to a prospect with that same objection. And sometimes, that more informal video type gets better results than the “super produced.” People would love to engage with such because of its appeal, although that doesn’t invalidate quality production.
Imagine if a roofing business owner does this for the next five years – two pieces of content a week just talking through these things and publishing them on youtube. Even if Google were gone, those things would keep raking in traffic. You’d be in denial if you think that such a person won’t make a considerable impact organically.
The Video Magic 📽
Here’s an idea. Leveraging local colleges and universities to produce good videos is a way you probably haven’t explored. One of the biggest things that college kids and recent grads face is rejection from somewhere they’re trying to get hired to right out of college due to their lack of real-world experience in the field.
And honestly, there’s always a saturation of candidates. So, how difficult would it be for a local company to Google a local college and reach out to the art department (for video editing) or go there in person and explain yourself to the chairperson or adjunct professor?
“Hey, we’re a local business; we need help with doing some video shoots and editing. Do you have anyone you recommend? We’re offering this. We understand the challenge students have on graduation, so we want to start here, and this is how we want to go about solving our problem and theirs. Any help is appreciated.”
They’ll send that out to a list of 15 or 100 students, and you can quickly find someone to help you, and that’ll be less expensive than the guy you’re going to pay $80,000 to. We’ve learned from our experience with video production that it’s better to have a separation between the guys filming the footage and those doing the editing to produce excellent videos. You’ll also have more efficient time usage doing that.
Plus, having very high-quality videos doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll have an audience. There’s more money to be spent getting your videos in front of many eyeballs to see them.
Final Thoughts
We understand the anxiety that comes with waiting and expectation after investing considerable sums of money into SEO; nonetheless, it has to take some time. But these are some things you can do “ethically” in the meantime.
- Upload platform-based, engaging content that answers your audience’s questions,
- Use keywords creatively,
- Maximize videos to secure your leads and nurture them,
- Buy good backlinks if you can afford them,
- And feel free to explore other routes!
There’s no one-size-fits-all on this. And unlike many SEO agencies that work with different types of businesses, here at Hook, every single innovation we make is targeted and applies to your business as a roofing company.
