Is SEO Still Worth the Time & Effort in 2016?

While there have been massive changes in the digital landscape over the past few years, there is no doubt that Search Engine Optimization is still an incredibly important part of any online marketing strategy.  A great SEO strategy makes it possible for even a small business owner to compete with the top players in his industry, and reach a great number of potential customers, creating great sales, at minimal cost. By getting your SEO done effectively, you can potentially transform your business to the next level. Below are just a few key points to help you better understand why SEO is still completely relevant and beneficial.  

Before going over the importance of having an effective SEO strategy, we’d like to share a word of caution to our readers.  Know that having “No SEO” is always better than hiring “Cheap SEO”.  If you want to hire an SEO agency, please ask what their strategies are and whether it involves adding backlinks to dubious sites (aka spammy tactics), which could hurt your site in a big way so always do your due diligence.

7 Benefits of Doing SEO

#1: Full Value for Your Money

SEO is an inbound marketing strategy that works because it is one of the most effective online marketing strategies that targets potential customers who are actively looking for your "keywords" to search for your product or service with intent to buy. This makes it a far more effective than an outbound marketing strategy such as cold-calling or direct mail and more more efficient than the PPC model (pay-per-click). Indeed, the leads generated by SEO generally cost about 51% less than those compared to most alternatives. This makes SEO a really cost-effective marketing strategy for your business.

#2: Helps Build a Dedicated Fan Base through a Newsletter

An effective application of SEO increases the traffic to your site by a long way, which eventually helps you to build a dedicated fan base by making use of RSS feeds and newsletters. While the exponential increase in the use of Social Media may have overshadowed RSS feeds and newsletters somewhat as effective marketing strategies, they are even today highly effective sources for getting traffic for your business. The most successful bloggers attest to email lists and RSS feeds still being the biggest source of their income than Social Media Marketing.

#3:  Works for Your Business 24×7

SEO always works for your business, bringing a constant stream of internet traffic to your site, no matter how early or how late in the day. With SEO, you are open for business 24/7, 365 days a year. Even when you sleep, SEO always keeps working, and works as a fantastic way to generate qualifed leads and in some cases passive income. Get your SEO strategy right by getting your website to rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), and watch the money flow into your bank account, even when you’re on holiday!

If you’d like to leverage any of these strategies, visit Markham SEO, a Toronto SEO Agency, dedicated to bringing businesses massive free traffic and exposure through the power Search Engine Marketing.

#4. Enhances your Social Media visibility

The relationship between SEO and Social Media is mutually beneficial. While getting your Social Media Strategy right is critical for your SEO, getting your SEO right, and having your website rank higher on the SERPs ensures that you get far better social media exposure. Quite simply, your tweets, posts or updates are likely to get far more Retweets on Twitter, Likes on Facebook or  +1s on Google Plus, when your website or blog has a high visibility on the search engine, whether on Google or on Yahoo or Bing.

#5. Helps You Go Toe-to-Toe with the Big Boys

Because an effective SEO campaign is cost-effective, it allows you to compete with the biggest companies in your industry that are spending 10X your Marketing budget on traditional advertising, including PPC. With the help of SEO, as a small business owner, you don’t have to be rich or have vast resources to be successful. SEO helps you reach your potential customers spread over a wide geography far more easily and at a relatively low cost. SEO is also a great way to build your brand and to compete with the more established brands by leveraging a more targeted audience.

#6. Sets You Up for the Long Term

SEO helps you to get a loyal and committed base of buyers who will stay with your business for the long term. Once you get to the higher end of Google’s SERPs because of an effective SEO strategy, you’ll find yourself getting exponentially more traffic online that will generate vast volumes of sales. Often, this is a virtuous cycle, as you use an effective SEO strategy to do well on Google’s SERPs, and once you’re there, the amazing exposure that your business gets becomes an added help to your SEO, which in turn helps you to grow your business even further.

#7. Helps You Keep Up with the Competition

The most important reason for you to hire an SEO firm for your search engine optimization is that everybody else is doing it, including your closest competitors. You certainly wouldn’t want to be left behind when everybody else is taking full advantage of the benefits of SEO. You may be offering the best products and services on your site, but that isn’t likely to be enough if you don’t have a proper SEO strategy in place. Your competitor is likely to get more clicks, and generate more sales because of he has an SEO strategy in place. So, don’t delay and make 2016 your turning point by hiring an SEO agency to help your business reach greater heights. 

Click on the link to receive your instant free SEO report and get tips on how to improve your SEO score.

Broken Link Building – What It Is and How To Use It

Broken Link Building is a White Hat SEO technique used by SEO professionals to get much needed backlinks from authority sites, the right way. Links are the currency of the Web, and to get noticed on Google and to rank highly on Google’s SERPs (or search engine results pages), it is important to have as many backlinks pointing at your content as possible. 

However, there are things that you cannot do, such as paying for backlinks, as this would violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If Google catches you doing that, the punishment would be swift and your site would be permanently blacklisted from its search engine. Broken Link Building is a permissible way to build links for your website – it is so White Hat that even the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin would approve it!   

Basically, Broken Link Building involves pointing out links that don’t work, are dead or non-functional on a website, in return for having them replaced with your own links. This is a great way to clear the Web of the clutter of dead links and make it cleaner and more functional.

Why Broken Link Building is such a useful SEO technique?

Broken Link Building is as legit as it gets and it is a terrific way to get your links added by the most reputable sites in your niche. You don’t need to be an expert at SEO to master this link building strategy; it is just as easy as it is efficient. Link building in general is a laborious process, it requires you to establish a relationship with site owners, write guest blogs for them, ask them to review your products, etc. Broken link building helps you avoid such hassles. It is the most painless way to build links for your website.

How to find Broken Links?

First, use the right tools. Some of the tools that can be of a lot of help are…

Google Alerts: Great tool for checking the sites in your niche. You can easily tell if any of them go out of business. When they do, it is just a matter of approaching the sites carrying their links and asking them to replace the now defunct links with those of yours.

Link Checker: Link Checker is a great browser extension that allows you to see broken links on any site at instantly.

CognitiveSEO: CognitiveSEO is one of the better backlink reporting tools using which you can filter the backlinks by and then sort them according to their authority.

Next, use the tool Link Checker to identify the dead links on the most important sites in your niche. Run every broken link that you’re able to identify through the backlink reporting tool – CognitiveSEO. This identifies all the active sites that are still linking to the dead domain. This way, you will probably find dozens of sites very quickly. 

Follow all websites and blogs in your niche on Twitter and Facebook, so that you will know immediately as soon as they go out of business. Google Alerts, about which we talked about earlier, keeps you updated about sites that go offline as well.

Another great technique is to use Yelp for local broken link opportunities. Look for local businesses on Yelp that have closed in your area. Their websites are likely to be closed as well. Now run these domains through a backlink reporting tool and identify the websites that link to them. 

The last step is to contact the Webmasters about the broken links on their websites. Get in touch with them and request them to replace the broken links with those of yours. To do so, you will have to find their contact information first. Here’s how you do that.

• You will most likely find their email address on the “contact us” or “about us” page on their website. Check the footer as well

• Do the following search on Google - “domain.com email” or “domain.com @domain.com hotmail.com yahoo.com gmail.com msn.com live.com”

• Is there a “contact us” form on the website?

• Do they have a Twitter handle?

These are just some of the techniques you can use to find the contact information of a webmaster. A word of advice is to be polite and professional while interacting with them, and in 90 percent of the cases, the webmasters add your links to their site as a matter of courtesy for pointing out the broken links. 

To learn more about this and other techniques, visit Markham SEO and check out our Blog.

Images courtesy of Elegant Themes & Military Hunting and Fishing.