Show Summary

How to get customers online? Kris Reid & Ardor SEO show how to attract customers to grow your business. You worked hard to build your business website, yet you’re struggling to attract new customers or make new sales online. Despite all of your marketing efforts, people are struggling to find you when they’re searching for the solution to their problems.

How can you organically direct new customers to your website at the right time so you can convert people into money-making clients?

If you’re looking for ways to make your website your new number one salesperson, then SEO will be your main tool. Kris Reid from Ardor SEO is here to guide you in the right direction. Welcome to Episode 279 of the Entrepreneurship Elevated Podcast!

Our Guest

Kris Reid from Brisbane Australia, studied software engineering, moved to London, and worked in finance until the 2008 Global Financial took his job away. He spent 2 years backpacking around the world to work out what to do with the rest of his life. During that time, he built an online game. As the game came to fruition, he began to consider how to get people to a website, and that’s when he started learning the mysteries of SEO.  He is the founder of Ardor SEO, and is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs get their business in front of the people that need them.

Ways to Attract and Get More Customers Online

These days, it’s easy to build and launch a website for your business. You can create a site using an online platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix and have a live site in just days—sometimes even hours.

However, many people have a beautiful website, but it’s not serving it’s purpose – to bring in new customers. These basic marketing tools do little to help you optimize your site so it’s easy to find via a quick Google search. More than ever, it’s important to build your site with customer acquisition in mind. If new customers can’t find you online, what’s the point of investing your time and money in building a site in the first place?

SEO: Learn what it is and how it can work for you

In order to get your website in front of new customers, you’ll need to optimize it with links, keywords, titles, and descriptions that will make sure your content shows up when people search for it. That’s the difference between having a website that is the driving force behind your sales, and a site that’s pretty but not functional.

It’s no secret—to attract new customers, you’ll need to rank high on Google Search. Of course, you need to be on the first page. But to really make sales through your site, you’ll need to be in the top three search results, which receive about 30% of the clicks. 

The key is SEO (search engine optimization), which will help you move up the ranks and get more traffic. By using the following techniques from Ardor SEO, you can start your climb up to the number one spot. There, your website will be positioned to start receiving those clicks on Google’s search page.

SEO is a technique used to let search engines like Google know that your business’s site is legitimate and provides real value for customers. Google wants it’s users to have a good user experience, so it will only show them your website if they think it’s relevant to what the user is searching for. Backlinks, keywords, metadata, and descriptions are a few of the main tools used to achieve this.

Depending on your industry, appropriate keywords and relevant referrers may differ, but by following these suggestions, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitor’s websites thanks to SEO.

Using keywords to help potential customers find you 

Keywords are a huge part of SEO. In order to get potential customers to the right place (your site), you’ll need to know what they’re typing into Google Search to solve their problem.

“It’s really about working out what’s right for your industry and what’s right for your business and how do you develop your website into being your best salesman.” — Kris Reid, Ardor SEO

To find your industry’s keywords, you’ll need to identify the problems your customers have and what solution your business provides them. Then, you’ll need to find the keywords to match and include them on your site.

Finding your industry’s keywords with affordable tools

Keyword research isn’t easy, but you don’t have to do it alone. There are some amazing, affordable tools available that can help you get started. Ardor SEO recommends ahrefs.com. You will need to sign up for the one-week trial which costs $7. 

From there, you will use ahrefs.com to research your top 10 competitor sites and see what keywords and links they’re using to achieve the top spots on the search page.

Here’s what you need to do to take advantage of ahrefs.com’s SEO tools:

1. Using Google, search your business’s core service and location. For example, “plumber new york.”
2. Notice what businesses fill the numbers 1-10 spots on Google’s first page.
3. One by one, copy your competitor’s domain name and paste it into ahrefs.com. Copy the list of keywords that the business is using.
4. Repeat for the top 10 competitors, copying all of their keywords.
5. Use these keywords throughout your own site to start moving up the rankings in front of your competitors.

However, you can’t use your new keywords just anywhere. You need to make sure you’re incorporating keywords in the right places in the right way.

In the past, repeating the same keywords again and again on your site would improve your search ranking. Today, search has become a lot more advanced. Google looks to make sure you have a range of meaningful keywords that are embedded in helpful, meaningful content on your site. Remember to optimize your keywords often for the best results.

Blogging to improve SEO

In most cases, a blog is the best way to sustainably grow with SEO. Remember, creating content is an investment in your business. If someone on your staff has the time and skills to write blog content, that’s great. If not, you can outsource blog writing and other web content creation to experts like Ardor SEO.

Not sure what content to include on your blog? Start by answering common questions your customers (and potential customers) have and are searching for online. By posting regularly, your site will become a valuable resource for customers, which helps to build trust. This strong customer relationship is exactly what Google is looking to rank high on its search results page.

Crafting good descriptions and titles to boost clicks to your site

You should also use SEO to optimize the titles and descriptions of your blog posts and webpages. Many businesses make the mistake of including their brand name in their titles, descriptions, and even links.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an effective strategy. You’ve already won the customers who search you by name, therefore advertising to them no longer makes an impact. Instead, you should focus on new customers who don’t know who you are yet. Using keywords in titles and descriptions instead of your brand name will help you capture the people who are looking for what you do.

Remember that a new customer wants to know as much as they can from the description displayed on Google’s homepage so that they don’t waste time exploring sites that cannot help them solve their problem. These customers want to know your location, what you do, and how you can help them fix a problem.

 Using backlinks to increase your site’s authority and ranking

Early on, it was fairly easy to manipulate your search ranking, which determines how close to the top your site will be when a potential customer conducts a Google Search. In the past, you could create a large number of low-quality backlinks to your website to trick Google into thinking you were a credible business. Many businesses, including Ardor SEO, used this strategy at the time and later were penalized by Google.

The algorithm of this changed with the Google Penguin Update in 2012. Suddenly, sites were blacklisted for cheating on the backlink system. Some people had even started to create bad links to their competitor’s sites to get them blacklisted too.

With this update, the SEO strategy changed for the better. Now, the best approach is to create great content, get links from quality sites, and provide your site’s users with the best experience possible.

“You can’t really cheat the system. You need to play the long term game of providing great value.” — Kris Reid, Ardor SEO

Backlinks are still the key to achieving number one on Google Search. However, they influence your site’s credibility (known as your domain authority score) based on how credible the referring site is.

It can be helpful to think of good backlinks as assuring your site belongs to a trusted neighbourhood of quality websites. Doing so increases your standing in Google’s algorithms. For example, if a widely known site like the New York Times (domain authority score 95 of 100) or Wikipedia (90 of 100) links to your site, your site’s score will increase. The same principle is true for lesser-known sites within your specific industry.

You can check your score using free online tools like Moz to see where your site currently stands. 

Some great ways to build backlinks to your site are to contribute content to other sites, ask other businesses you work with to link to you or even be a guest on a podcast.

How are SEO and SEM marketing different?

We already know SEO means search engine optimization through improved keywords, content, and backlinks. On the other hand, we have search engine marketing. Though similar at times, SEO and SEM have one critical difference: SEO is free while SEM is not.

SEM is performed through paid ads on a search platform. In Google’s case, this is Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords). These ads can display on Google search. You’ve seen them as the top few ads on the results page, with the word “Ad” included before the listing.

While this is the easiest way to get to the top, it’s expensive. Creating effective Google Ads is difficult unless someone on your staff has time and resources to educate themselves, build ads, and then optimize them each week. If you’re serious about adding Google Ads to your strategy, you’ll want to consider hiring it out to a dedicated SEO/SEM business.

Get started improving your SEO

Though this article explains the basics, it can be hard to know where to start improving your SEO in a way that will attract new customers. A great place to start is by typing in your site’s name into the Google search bar like this:

site: www.yoursitename.com

This will show you which pages on your website Google is currently ranking the highest. Are you happy with what your customers are seeing? If not, then you can start making changes, page by page.

Here are some common issues you might notice and how to fix them:

Get in front of your customers now!

Knowing your industry keywords is critical to properly incorporating SEO techniques, boosting your rankings on Google search, and ultimately getting more traffic and customers. To figure out what keywords you should use, visit Ardor SEO’s site for a special offer for Mike’s listeners. 

Once you’re there, watch the video to learn more about what Ardor SEO can offer your business. We devise data-driven strategies that attract new customers and convert them into clients.

We hope you use the tips we’ve outlined in this article to get your page ranking higher on Google’s first page and secure long-term business growth!

Guest Links

Website: http://ardorseo.com

Free Offer: http://ardorseo.com/mike

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