Well hey there, friend. Welcome back to the special podcast series, ModMarketing. Thanks for joining me throughout this series. If this is your first ModMarketing series episode, I’ll recap what I’ve covered so far in this special series. This series kicked off way back on episode 68 with me sharing with you what ModMarketing means to me and why AEC firms like yours must modernize their marketing to compete in today’s industry and with new buyers.

And, this was even before I attended HubSpot’s inbound 2022 conference. There were two very telling statistics shared at that conference – first, it was from the LinkedIn B2B Research Institute. Their research shows that 54% of decision-makers spend more than an hour a week reading and reviewing thought leadership. The next was from a google study. It shows that buyers, or in our case decision-makers or selection committee members, are now 80% through the sales process before they actually talk to a salesperson.

These two statistics alone are telling me and should be telling you, that the bottom line – the people who are buying your services or selecting your firm for that project are doing their research and they’re doing it online.

And that’s why I decided to create the ModMarketing podcast series. Because in talking to marketers like you, I realize that there’s a need to provide insight and step-by-step processes to get you started.

So the ModMarketing podcast series does just that from starting with setting goals and identifying personas to outlining a content creation and promotion strategy to developing your content calendar.

One area I’ve touched on in several episodes but haven’t dedicated an entire episode yet is to SEO or search engine optimization. This topic could be its own podcast series or even an online training course because there’s so much that goes into SEO. But for now, I’ve split this topic into two episodes to get you started.

In this first episode, I will define what SEO is and how it works. Then I’m going to walk through how you can optimize your own web pages for better SEO. Then in next week’s episode, I’m going to share some other ways that you can increase the authority of your website and why that matters as well as give you a three-step plan to get started improving your SEO.

But first, let’s back up a minute and go back to what the primary goal of a ModMarketing or content marketing program is. And that’s to get your firm found online. This can be done by creating content highlighting your firm’s expertise and subject matter experts. However, it’s not enough to just publish this content on your firm’s website or blog. To have the right potential clients find that content, the content needs to appear in searches. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

According to HubSpot, the definition of SEO is techniques that assist to have your firm’s website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This makes your firm’s website more visible via search engines like Yahoo!, Google, or Bing to those who are seeking solutions that your firm’s brand, service, or product could offer.

So let me quickly go through how SEO Works. Again, this is just a very basic overview but I think it’s important to understand this at an even a high level so you can deploy different SEO strategies.

I’m going to get a little technical but stay with me here.

So how does SEO Work?

Search engines crawl the internet to scoop up tidbits of phrases and keywords to index them. Then when a user types in a phrase, question, or keyword into the search engine, it provides results to the user based on those indexes. Search engines are searching for the websites, webpages, blogs, etc. that different websites are publishing.

Search engines also look at the website structure and design, visitor behavior, and mobile optimization. So, it’s not just about the content that is being published, but the framework in which it’s published too.

Okay, still with me? Now let’s talk about the elements of your website and content that increase organic traffic. And organic traffic is most likely what your firm is aiming for. Organic traffic is the visitors or traffic that come to your website through search engines or organically. The traffic isn’t coming through a paid advertisement on the search engine.

There are elements of the website, structure, webpages, and even your firm’s social media channels that help or hurt getting organic traffic. Now let me cover some of the elements that have the most impact.

Consistent Content Creation

Your website needs to be updated on a regular basis. Publishing genuine content that interests the targeted personas greatly improves SEO. The more often you’re producing and updating content on your website, the “fresher” it appears to search engines. It also helps to make the content easy to read or skim by using small paragraphs, descriptive headings, lists, and bullet points. And it also helps to link to other internal webpage and other external pages throughout that piece of content.

SEO-Friendly Webpage Structure

Each webpage has a built-in structure that is universal no matter what program your firm uses for your website software. Each page usually has a hierarchy of headings that tells the search engines the importance of the content. For example, the heading tag called H1 is the main header tag. This is typically reserved for the title of the page. Then there are heading tags H2, H3, etc. Just like in a printed document, these should be used to help guide the reader (and search engines) through the webpage content.

While in previous episodes I’ve talked about the importance of searching for keywords and making sure they appear throughout the content. You want to make it a delicate balance of just how many times keywords appear. Search engines have gotten smarter and can tell when you’re trying to cram too many keywords just to get ranked. So when creating new content, don’t cram it full of all the keywords. Make sure the keywords, topics, and phrases are spread throughout the piece and flow naturally into the content. Be sure to use keywords in the title tags (H1, H2, etc.). Also, make sure that the content is easy to read and/or skim by using many small paragraphs, descriptive headings, lists, and bullet points, for example.

Image Optimization

Another SEO component is how fast the webpage loads and images are the biggest culprits when it comes to slowing down webpage load times. Since AEC firms tend to have very visual websites, it’s easy for the websites to be slowed down dramatically due to the number of images. Make sure that every image on the website is compressed and in the right image format for the screen (as opposed to print-level quality).

Meta Descriptions

A meta description is the text that appears in the search results underneath the page title. I’ve provided a screenshot on the show notes page showing an example that appears with the search “Deltek Vantagepoint Upgrade.” In that example, when you search Deltek Vantagepoint Upgrade, the title of our page appears in the blue clickable text in Google Search. The meta description is below that blue clickable text and also has the keywords upgrading, Deltek, and Vantagepoint in bold.

Again, you can see this over at marketerstakeflight.com/88.

Meta descriptions can be added to the backend of your website builder and should be written to include keywords and phrases. The meta description should also be relevant to the content that is on the page, so keyword stuffing will actually hurt the results. Also, the meta description length should be between 150-300 characters.

URL Structure

Did you know that URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator? Just like the webpage structure and meta descriptions, search engines display the URL on the search results. Consider following these SEO best practices when creating URLs:

Use clear, descriptive words in the URL as opposed to random numbers and letters. For example, www.marketerstakeflight.com/blog would be better than www.marketerstakeflight.com/453=?45659.

Try to use shorter URLs whenever possible. There is some research that shows that shorter URLs perform better because URLs that are too long will be cut off in search results. However, it’s just as important to be descriptive in the URL so don’t cut the URL length just to cut it.

Use keywords in the URL. If the page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. But don’t go overboard or appear too spammy. The search engines know it and will penalize the content. For example, a spammy URL might be www.fullsailpartners.com/vantagepoint-partner/upgrade-to-vantagepoint/vantagepoint-upgrade-services. A good way to test this is to look at the URL through the eyes of a searcher and ask if it looks natural or like a robot wrote it.

Use hyphenations instead of spaces. Every search engine interprets special characters or spaces the same. Use hyphens to separate the words in the URL.

Use geographic location names, if applicable. If the content is about a specific location or a project in a specific location, use that location name in the URL. This can include city names, neighborhoods, or other regional descriptors.

Okay, my friend, I hope you have a little more understanding of how SEO works and some things you should be aware of as you create your website, webpages, and content.

This is just part 1. In part 2 which comes out next week, I’ll go through some off-page SEO strategies or what I like to call the secret sauce to spice up your SEO. And, I’m going to give you a three-step process to review and improve your SEO.

So, make sure you subscribe to this show, so you don’t miss that next episode.  

Until then my friend, bye for now.