I generally guarantee my results. I know that if my clients follow my advise they will increase their online visibility and with that bring in leads and sales. However I usually tell them it will take at least 6 months before we will see any results. Now anyone in Inbound Marketing knows that this is very conservative but of course if I’m issuing a guarantee I need to mitigate my risk a little bit. However these days I see results quicker and quicker.
One such example is my friend and client Nicky Abdinor. We have embarked on a small scale Inbound Marketing campaign to enhance her speaking and training business. She already runs a successful consultancy but wanted to build out her portfolio to other income streams. The first step was to build her a search engine and visitor friendly website which we started last year. We’ve built it on the Genesis Framework which I have found to be one of the best and well supported professional themes for WordPress websites. (It’s by far not the only one of course, just the one I settled on).
An optimised website is the first key
I mention this here as it is an important aspect of Inbound Marketing, your website absolutely must be optimised for the goals it needs to achieve. In Nicky’s case she mainly needed a good looking online representation of who she is and what she has to offer. She engaged a professional photographer and the result are some visually appealing photographs on her website.
Once the website was set up it was time to start putting content on it and she’s started to add some posts here and there. In a recent session with Nicky we discussed that we’d like her page to rank for “disability training” on Google as this is a new aspect of her offerings she wanted to promote. I told her that the first step will be to put a good valuable blog post together on the topic. 7 days ago she posted “Changing Perceptions: Disability Training“, and here comes the exciting part.
In the “old” days (and I’m talking even as recent as a year) there was a discipline called SEO and if you didn’t know all the tricks of it you would never end up on page 1 of Google search results. However Google has changed their systems dramatically with the Panda and Penguin updates (amongst hundreds of others) and today the general advise is to produce good valuable content for the visitor and the search engine will pick up on it.
It’s become as “simple” as that.
To page 1 on Google within 7 days
When I advised Nicky to write her blog post I didn’t expect to see results immediately, although I did mention to her that it won’t be difficult, as there simply isn’t any good content for that search term available, certainly not in South Africa but I didn’t expect how quickly it all went. Today, only 7 days of her posting her article she ends up on spot no. 4 on the first page of Google, beating 107 million other websites, for her desired keyword! (A not logged in search in a new incognito window from South Africa)
Granted, there aren’t that many searches for it. Only about 110 locally for the exact term but those 110 who type this term in are very likely looking for exactly that which Nicky has to offer, disability training! As an Inbound Marketer I now ask myself what are all the factors that have contributed to this success, and there are of course a few.
As I mentioned having a well laid out website is the first step, fairly regular content is another and Nicky has been posting as often as she could – if you look at her blog that isn’t even that often. She also sends signals to Google (&co) from social sites, she’s active on Twitter and recently on G+. The latter is an interesting one, because it’s easy to imagine that having authorship set up (basically telling Google about your blog and they in return showing your picture in search results) will enhance your results on their search engine. However in Nicky’s case we haven’t even done that yet! She just set up her G+ profile and we’re still busy with adding all these bits and bobs.
To summarize, here is Nicky’s success recipe of getting to page one on Google:
- Have a well laid out website
- Appeal to visitors and search engines alike
- Provide high quality content written for the visitor
- Optimise the little bits (title tags, alt txts, pictures, etc.)
- Be active on social sites and link back to your website
- And of course the basics: have a relevant offer (in her case actual disability training for companies)
This blog post now links to her website which also helps it rank. Linking remains an important aspect, but here too, it’s the quality over quantity principle that has finally succeeded in the SEO world.
Well done Nicky and I’m looking forward to watching you conquer even more topics!
Naturally, if you’re interested on achieving similar results for your business I invite you to engage with me in a one on one consultation. We can kick things off with a free Inbound Marketing assessment.
Excellent!
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