Is SEO important for online businesses?

Is SEO important to your online business? You may be wondering if you're better off with SEO, AEO, GEO, Ads, social media, or something else. Find out how and where SEO fits into your small business marketing plan. I'm here to help you understand how to grow and market your business. 

Transcript

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Hi there, and welcome back to the podcast. Today, I want to talk about a question that I've been getting a lot, and that is: Is SEO important for online entrepreneurs or online businesses? Does SEO work for us? Does it make a difference? Because I know many times in this online entrepreneurial world, it seems like everybody and their brother, and maybe even their dog, is running a ton of Facebook ads. And so all of the recommendations are to scale ads and add audiences and do this and this and this and this, and suddenly your nervous system is kind of going, "Um, I can't do this. This is like $25,000 a month or $20,000 a day," or whatever it is. So, SEO, or search engine optimization, can help you as an online business owner, and it can allow you to run a more profitable business. Now, that doesn't mean that you may not want to have an ad strategy. It doesn't mean you may not want to be on social media. The way I look at it, having been in marketing for so long, is that it's really good not to have all your eggs in one basket. It's better to be spread out and be marketing your business on different channels. This was always what we taught our franchise owners when I worked at the franchisee at the corporate office and was on the marketing team. New small business owners who came into our world were taught how to market their businesses, and we talked about marketing them using all sorts of different marketing channels. Now, what's funny is I've been in marketing long enough that I remember when Meta ads were brand new. I also remember when social media marketing was brand new. So I've marketed businesses since before those things existed. So there are ways to grow your business, an online business or a brick-and-mortar business, with or without any different marketing channel. Now, I look at search engine optimization, you can call it AI SEO, answer engine optimization, whatever you wanna call it. That is a core marketing strategy that any business can use. So yes, you can use that as an online entrepreneur. What we want to do is think about how we want to create content, how we want to connect with our audience, and how we want to show up online when they're searching based on where they search. So they're gonna be searching for information- On social media potentially. They may be searching on Google, they may be searching with ChatGPT or AI, they may be searching by listening to podcasts. Anywhere somebody is searching for information, we want to show up. So what you wanna think about as an online business owner, as an entrepreneur, is where am I, where am I comfortable? Where do I want to spend my time? Where do I want to focus my efforts? Which channels feel the best to me? Because you don't have to focus on a marketing channel that feels icky to you or that you don't like, you don't want to be part of. You can focus on any one of the channels, and I recommend that you do more than just one channel. Because, especially with ads, we don't wanna become dependent upon ads, because what happens if our account gets hacked or we get locked out of it, or we can't make any adjustments, we make a mistake and we, you know, get ourselves locked out for 30 days or locked out permanently? So we wanna make sure that we have multiple channels working That's why I always say that SEO, or search engine optimization, should be part of what you're doing, because it allows you to connect with the right people and be visible wherever they're searching. It also helps you to figure out what content to create for your audience. It helps you figure out what words they're using, what questions they're asking within the searches. So as an online business owner, as an online entrepreneur, I want you to do SEO even if you are f- heavily focused on the ads game. The ads game may be exactly what you want to do, but having some SEO, having some organic at play as well, will benefit you because it's going to help you really see what people are searching for, what people are interested in, what your website can potentially rank for. And the other thing you wanna think about is you're paying for all the ad traffic that you're getting, and if you can get some of that traffic organically, you are more profitable because you're not paying for that organic traffic, so you're keeping a bigger share of the revenue that you're bringing in. So having multiple channels at play is very beneficial But I really want you to understand that yes, SEO can help and can work for an online business. You do not have to have a brick-and-mortar location in order to do SEO. What you need in order to use search engine optimization to help grow your business is to have a website. You need to have a website of your own, you need to be able to add content to that site, and you need to work to create great content for your audience. So you need to have a clear understanding of who it is that you're helping and how you're helping them. Because when I teach you how to do this, like when you join me in Simple SEO Content or we work together one-on-one, I teach you how to do this the way that we did it in the corporate world and the way we do it in the agency world, which is we are strategic about the content that we create. Every piece of content we create has a job, and that job is to either be found or to nurture and help convert the person who already found us from a different piece of content. So we really are working hard to lay a foundation of both visibility and conversion with everything that we do. So you want to have that website where you can add content. You want to then create content that is going to be able to be found by the right people. You're also going to want to create content that will help nurture them. Then we're going to make sure that we are optimizing it so that the search engines, whether it's traditional ones like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or our new answer engines or AI-based search, things like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, we want both to know us. And there are different things we do to optimize for the different search engines. Then we're going to put that content out into the world. Now we know we've created something that people are searching for that will help our ideal customer, that ties back to our business so that we bring in buyers, not just browsers. And then from there, we're able to really spread that word about our business using those organic channels to bring in visibility, traffic, leads, and revenue. And from there, if you want to use ads, you want to use social media, you want to add a podcast, whatever it is, you can have multiple marketing channels. But make sure you're not just building your business upon a single channel. I've seen businesses go out of business because they were so dependent upon a single channel. There was a really cute little breakfast restaurant in my neighborhood in Phoenix when I lived there, and it opened not too long before we moved Nice guy, good food, great location, but they didn't market their business. They decided they were only focusing on word-of-mouth marketing. They had a website, but they had no content. They had done no optimization. They ran no ads. They were not in the chamber, like, they were not partnering with anyone. They were only dependent upon word-of-mouth marketing. Their whole thing was people were gonna come in, they were gonna eat, they were gonna be amazed by it, and they were going to write reviews, and they were gonna tell all their friends about it. It's a great concept, but the reality is most people don't tell all of their friends about you, and because they were so dependent upon that one marketing channel, they actually did not make it because they didn't optimize their, their listing. They didn't optimize their website. They didn't run any ads. Like, they didn't do a lot of the other things that could have helped them. The other thing was, honestly, if we're being completely honest between you and I, the food was not so amazing that you were, like, gonna run out and tell other people about it. It was good. They were nice. The ambiance left a little be desired. Like, it wasn't one of those places that you were gonna go, "Oh, my gosh, you've got to try this new place over by the grocery store. It's amazing." They were not that kind of restaurant. So they needed to do some other things, but because they were so dependent upon just one channel, they didn't see it, and they didn't do it, and ultimately they did not last long. So when you're marketing your business, don't depend on, on just one channel. Make sure that you are If you are online, whether you are brick-and-mortar or you're online only, make sure that your website is optimized and you've done SEO, because that needs to be at your foundation of everything you're doing. That needs to help you determine what content you're creating, what keywords you're going after, what questions you're answering, how you're tying what you're doing to your customers' needs so that you're bringing the right people in. You're answering the questions of the people who will buy from you. All of this is really important. So as an online entrepreneur, as an online business owner, if you want to grow your business Hopefully, you know you need to do this. Join me in Simple SEO Content. I will teach you how to do this for your business. We'll get you up, we'll get you moving, we'll get you optimized, we'll get some more visibility, some more leads coming in. Or work with me one-on-one, and we can work on getting all of this taken care of. We can go through your funnel as well, make sure that every step from when they find out about you till they give you money is optimized and ready to go. All right, that's it for today. Hopefully, you understand that, yes, SEO is incredibly important for your online business. Other marketing channels are important as well. Don't just depend upon one. All right, I will see you back here next week. You have a great time. If you are not yet signed up for the live in-person training, it's coming up really super quick. Go ahead and get signed up for that, and then plan on joining me in the July cohort of Simple SEO Content, and I will see you back here next week. Bye for now.