OMG – why is your site sitting on page 12? What the heck? You listened to the commercial about putting up your website with an Intuit® or GoDaddy® site builder kind of website. (Incidentally, we DO like GoDaddy for domain name buying and hosting – check ’em out.) They told you that you would be magically found pronto. You didn’t see ANY reason to spend a few thousand dollars on a website by a professional web designer and certainly DIDN’T see ANY need to be paying one of these SEO people every month to work on your site. You were able to do it all yourself or better seek help from Lizardwebs.

How’s THAT working for you?

Probably not too good. You’re on page 12. You’re statistically invisible. You spent almost a month of your OWN time away from your REAL business to do that website and it’s not doing a thing. The web doesn’t work. You’ve been misled. This was supposed to be the magic bullet for my business. It ISN’T. Not if you went this way at least.

Some things are best left to professionals

And your website and search engine ranking are two of them. When you built your website with those gracious 5 pages allotted to you, how did you focus each page? What are the money keywords that you wanted to reach on them? Did you include your business location with the proper rich snippet formatting to let Google know you’re truly a local business (if applicable). Did you look to see if people are even searching for the terms that YOU think are important? Did you get your title tags right? Did you even INCLUDE a proper title tag that says something more helpful than “Home”? For more information on how search engines and seo actually works, check out this link to Moz.com.

These are just a few things that a search engine optimization company will normally do to and for your website. Bet you didn’t even know about some of those things did you? To top THAT off, there are a lot of things that we don’t even mention here – things that search engine specialists do without even thinking about it. It’s sort of like explaining to someone how to get to your local Walmart. You’d start off with “Go down here to this next corner, hang a left. Go to the first stop light, hang a right and it’s going to be about 2 miles down on the left.” People leave out the minutiae like, “Get your car keys. Walk to the car. Open the door. Get in car. Insert keys and turn clockwise. Put car in reverse… etc” With search engines, smart as you might think they are, they aren’t. They often don’t grasp intent – and when they do seem to grasp intent, it may NOT be the intent you had in mind.

Take out the Driving Blind thing

SEOs will usually leave out chance – at least the good ones will – and make sure the pages reflect exactly what your site needs to be found for. If you site yammers on and on about shoes, it might be an assumed thing that these are the kind that you wear on your feet. But if they are, what kind of shoes ARE they? Men’s, women’s, children’s. Dress shoes? Athletic shoes? But what about if those AREN’T the type of shoes at all? What if you sell BRAKE shoes? Does your website make it clear to the search engines that these are automotive parts? They work with cars and trucks? NOT men and women?

These are just some simple things to think about and to drive home why doing your own website and SEO work usually is NOT in your best interest – any more than doing your own car repairs (in most cases). In both cases, you need these “vehicles” to get you where you WANT to go. And if your vehicle isn’t set up the right way or in good condition – it’s just NOT going to get you there. Find out what kind of difference having a true search engine optimization company working on YOUR site can make..

 

25 Replies to “Raleigh SEO”

  1. I’m pretty new to SEO and all that stuff, but your video has given me a
    much clearer understanding of how and why it developed as such through the
    years. Thanks for this. :)

  2. I learned a lot of useful SEO back in the late 90’s and early 2000. I see I
    have a lot to learn today also. Thank you very much for this eye opening
    video, Lisa! :-)

  3. Hi Lisa, great video (as usual !). I have one ‘technical” question: which
    software/hardware do you use to make the ‘blackboard’ effect + the
    hand-writing ?

  4. I just found your video. Lots of good info. Time for me to get a blog. LOL
    Keep up the good work I’ll be watching you.

  5. This was a good overview of the overview +Lisa Irby Diversification was
    always key. The problem today is that the web is essentially controlled
    by a handful of companies. Diversification in an oligopoly is virtually
    impossible. In my space (books: http://aalbc.com), I’ve seen MANY
    excellent sites, some with great potential, wither away and die simply
    because they were undiscoverable in search. Amazon, and all the other book
    sites, they own have not replicated what was lost. I created a website
    http://huria.org to highlight Black owned indie sites, but I’m afraid we no
    longer have enough real estate on the web to make a difference. In the
    late 1990’s larger sites would link to a smaller site; In 2013, big sites
    don’t link to small site or use “no follow.” Making it virtually
    impossible for a new indie web to be found — let alone generate a living
    wage for the owner. Your presence is encouraging. Let me know if they is
    anything you do that you’ve done that would like me to share with my
    network.

  6. Hi Lisa I’ve been watching your videos and would like to say WOW! Many
    people post videos on You Tube including myself but most videos don’t
    really teach the viewer anything and for me that does not work. Your videos
    on the other hand give actionable ideas and web url’s that cause me to
    think and plan my own marketing effort.
    Thank You Lisa

  7. Lisa, this is funny. On the day you uploaded this video, Penguin 2.0 was
    starting to impact sites and two days later it was announced and complettly
    rolled out. 

  8. The more I research SEO, the more I realize I’ve been doing it wrong :/
    Thanks for the tip about social media. I do Google searches for my site and
    find that my organization’s social media accounts are ranked higher than
    the official site.

  9. you are AMAZING Lisa!!! You and the way you teach is such a blessing 🙂
    thank you. I just subscribed and have watched a couple of videos and I am
    blown away at how well i’m following and understanding better

  10. This video does a good job in speaking about the past of SEO such as meta
    tags and how it relates to the future.

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