SEO Journey Month 1: The Quest for Organic Growth

Tl;Dr: We’re trying to grow our sales by increasing how many people visit our website. We’re going to post a series of articles to explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how it’s helped us grow. Hopefully it helps you grow your business too. 

Why We're Focusing on SEO

We started our online presence in August 2023 with a self-made website. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. We do eventually want to have a really slick looking website. But, why are we going to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a professionally designed website that no one is seeing? If people are searching “for sale sign installer near me” and they’re seeing our competition’s page.. didn’t we just waste a whole lot of money?

Before we make the investment in a high quality website, we want to get more eyeballs on our pages. 

Since Google handles 91.5% of all internet traffic, getting found on Google is the light, the truth and the way to growing organic views. The first thing that comes up when talking about increasing views is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the term for a group of activities that helps you rank higher on Google search results. If you spend any time at all researching SEO, you’ll find it to be a pretty complex business. Metadata, backlinks, keywords, orphan pages – just learning the language takes hours. Just like anything, it probably takes years to get good at SEO. And we don’t have years.  

But we do want the results, which can often be a 5x, 10x, or 20x increase in your # of views. 

After hearing some of the case studies from businesses that had experienced substantial growth from SEO – growth where they had so many incoming calls and orders that they were having to hire more people – we knew SEO was something we needed if we wanted to be seen in the first 3 search results when people google “real estate sign installation”. 

There are 3 levers you can pull to make something successful – time, money and experience. Since we don’t have the time or the experience to do our own SEO, we hired AM Marketing SEO to run our SEO for us. The difficult thing about SEO is that it takes 3-6 months or longer to achieve results. So you’re investing thousands of dollars without an immediate payback, which can be difficult to stomach.  

The point of this series is to measure the value we get from doing SEO. Hopefully it helps you feel comfortable taking the first step in your SEO journey as a new business. We’re going to monitor effectiveness each month using the leading and lagging metrics below. Lagging metrics are the outcomes that we want (i.e. more page views) and leading metrics are the inputs we can control to achieve the outcomes. We can’t force people visit our website, but we can post more online so that more people have the opportunity to view. 

 

1. Number of Articles Written | 2

This metric is the # of articles we have written that we are posting to our website. Posting quality content helps enhance SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers' questions. While there are a number of variables SEO experts consider when talking about the SEO quality of your article, a couple particularly important ones are the SEO keywords you’re using and the length of the article you’re writing. 

You may have noticed I’ve thrown in a couple phrases throughout this article which are specific to our for sale sign installation business - for sale sign installer near me, real estate sign installation, etc. These are the keywords we’re using to improve our SEO at Installnow.io. 

These are the words that our customers use when they’re searching for businesses like ours, and so we use these in our content. The more we use these keywords, the more Google recognizes us as an authority on that subject matter and the higher quality that article becomes in helping us get in front of our customers. 

Also important to us ranking high for our keywords are the length of the article you’re writing. I’ve seen 4 or 5 sources that have different ideas as to what the right length is, but it seems to be between 1500 and 2500 words. That’s because longer content reinforces your knowledge and authority on a subject - particularly if it's a keyword or a topic for a very specific audience. 

 

This seems like a pretty self-explanatory metric. In order for people to visit your website, they have to know about you. For them to know about you, you have to post about yourself. So, we’re posting about ourselves! 

We only posted 4 times this month, and once a week feels like a pretty low bar. But candidly, it’s pretty hard for us to think about new content to post on top of as well as run our business. We do think there’s probably a way to cheat a little bit, though. We’re going to try and create one article each week between 1,500 and 2,500 words, post valuable snippets from the article four times in that week so that we actually have 16 posts, and see if that tunes our output metrics up a bit.

 

This one is also pretty self-explanatory. The more people we’re connected with, the more views we’ll get on our posts, and the more people will visit our website. 

We’re only focusing one social media platform because we don’t have the bandwidth to do multiple ones right now. LinkedIn is the right platform for us because we’re focusing on creating more long-form content (because it helps you rank higher on Google). There’s a lot less work needed to roll over content from our website to LinkedIn than there is to re-work the visual content and written copy for Instagram.

The bummer about LinkedIn is that you can only add 100 new connections each week, and it’s not as prominent of a platform with our customers. However, we’re getting about a 30% acceptance on our requests whereas we’re getting about 12% on Instagram. When we consider it takes about an hour to add 100 connections on both LinkedIn and Instagram, we’re getting about a 2.5x return on LinkedIn. That makes LinkedIn the more worthwhile choice if we can only pick one. 

 

This is where a lot of the magic happens in terms of SEO. Backlinks are probably the most important thing you can do to improve the views you get on your website. But what is a backlink?

A backlink is when a website links to another website (just like I did with Ahref’s Backlinks Checker, which is where we get our backlinks number). Google interprets backlinks as a sign of credibility; that means the more backlinks you get from other websites that point to your website, the higher you’re going to rank on Google.

For $500, the SEO service we uses offers us 20 high quality backlinks each month in addition to a whole host of high-value services, like choosing your SEO keywords (they’re the ones who recommended we use For Sale Sign Installer and Real Estate Sign Installation as a couple of our primary keywords!). Google regularly analyzes the web for new backlinks. As Google starts to recognize the backlinks directed at our website, it improves our Domain Authority and directs more people to our page. 

 

1. Number of Clicks From Google | 46 

Pretty self-explanatory. Right now, 46 people have clicked on our website after searching for one of five keywords in Google (keywords had 28, 5, 4, 1, and 1 clicks). We’re hoping that as we write more articles and increase our Domain Authority, we’ll appear more times in more keywords.

 

We wrote 4 articles for 174, 175, 585 and 315 views. Our highest viewed post was a poll that got roughly 2x the views of our others, which were static content. It seems like LinkedIn rewards content that engages users more effectively, so we’ll be looking to work that into our posts in a way that’s hopefully helpful and genuine and not clickbait-y.

 

This is a pretty new concept for us, and there are just things we don’t understand about the impact this number has (though we know it’s important!). Hopefully we’ll be able to report on this a bit more in the coming months.

 

We’re measuring this as the # of clients that did not come from direct sales outreach. We’ll also measure this in terms of total dollars for those new clients, and we’ll do an ROI on that vs. the amount we pay for our SEO service. More to come! 

 

1. Since we’re a services business that only operates in very specific local areas, how do we prioritize those areas with these SEO efforts?

2. Is there keyword-specific domain authority? 

3. If we were to post content that doesn’t use our keywords, does that reduce our domain authority?

4. How does my Google My Business profile factor into our SEO plan?

5. When should paid ads come into the equation?

6. What are the differences in results between local link building and building links with the highest DA websites possible?

 

We’re feeling cautiously optimistic about this SEO thing. We’re going to keep measuring things and keep a long-term mentality as we look to expand our web presence and fight the battle of anonymity. If you have any questions, please give us a shout! We'd love to connect and discuss ways that you're growing your business.