Have you ever wondered why certain websites always appear first on Google searches, even though they are not “Authority Websites” such as Amazon, Fiverr, and such? How do they accomplish this?
Well, in this post we will share the basic insights into organic promotion of your brokerage’s website on Google, or in professional lingo: SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is a method of promoting your website via organic searches on Google. To understand this though, let’s first take a step back and clarify organic and sponsored promotion on Google. Sponsored promotion, also known as PPC, is a modality by which you pay Google in order to place a link to your website in the top 3 results for a certain search keyword. These websites usually have a small icon, either yellow or green, that states that it is an ad and a sponsored link.
Organic promotion, a.k.a. SEO, is a method by which a website’s content is custom-tailored so that it appears in the first results for a certain keyword without paying Google for every exposure or entry by potential clients. It is called “Organic” because what you are essentially doing is fulfilling the requirements that Google’s algorithm uses in order to identify your website as the most relevant to the user’s query.
The Three Golden Rules
So what are the most important things when using SEO to promote your website? In reality, it is a constant game of cat-and-mouse with Google that requires not only various skills and software, but a constant monitoring of Google’s requirements – as these requirements change frequently. Therefore, you should definitely use the services of an SEO specialist, but here are the three most important rules of thumb, in our opinion, to keep in mind when instructing and managing your SEO team, whether in-house or outsourced.
- Keyword research is the most important thing to consider. Keywords are the search words that you expect users to type when looking for businesses like yours. So for instance, someone looking for Forex brokerages is likely to search for words with financial relevance, not flights to Aruba! A good SEO specialist, and the marketing director of said specialist, should try to “enter the clients head” and think of all the combinations of words that a potential client will search. These words must then be inserted into the website’s content in strategic places (titles, headlines, paragraphs, images, etc.) in varying amounts.
- The second thing you must do is inherently linked to the previous issue, and that is to watch your keyword density – that is, how often you use your chosen keywords. Too little and your website will not be recognized by Google as highly relevant. Too much and Google will recognize it as “keyword spamming” and view your website as either fake or irrelevant (and yes – “keyword spamming” is an actual thing!). This is why you need to make sure that whoever is writing your content knows what the current optimal keyword density is (Google changes this parameter all the time), and how to keep the appropriate ratio of keywords.
- Timeline expectations are another thing to keep in mind. It is important to understand and keep in mind that the average time after which SEO efforts begin to bear fruit is 3-4 months. If you see a sudden increase in traffic before this, it is either sheer luck or the result of another marketing effort on your part. Traditionally, SEO is combined with PPC in a manner by which PPC campaigns bring traffic for the first few months, and are then reduced as the effects of your SEO campaigns begin to be visible. This is because the main shortcoming of PPC campaigns is that you lose traffic the second you stop paying, unlike SEO traffic, which is more sustainable over time. Provided, of course, that you continue to update your website and content to meet the requirements of Google’s search algorithm.
At the end of the day, SEO is one of the most efficient long-term methods of online marketing, and the information brought forth in this post is merely the tip of the iceberg. The main take-home messages from this post should be that SEO is a marketing effort worth taking, that you should use the services of a specialist, either in-house or outsourced, and that you should not expect to see results immediately, but only after 3-4 months. In an internet dominated by Google, SEO is a must-have for any business that wants to succeed on a global level, and we will be happy to provide more information and tips on the matter in the future.
