The good the bad and the ugly in SEO

Most companies now have taken the foresight to dive into the SEO market. Some will do it head first will others will dip a toe to find the best way forward. SEO in the near future is here to stay. Combine that with Social Media and your armed to the teeth in a never ending war against your competitors.

The Good

The good part is that most SEO services will stay within the safe guidelines that Google has provided. That means natural link building by providing quality content. Not copying and pasting into your CMS. Most will do a through analysis of your site, starting onsite, working with relevant keywords, by that I mean converting keywords. A good example of that is in the Hotel industry. a phrase like "Hotel Kuala Lumpur" might not be the best converting phrase. In terms search volume, it is pure mass. Around 130,000 searches locally per month. Now getting a percentage of this market would make anyone happy. I would consider this a branding phrase. Great to get your name up there however the conversion would not be high in terms of sales. If you were a budget Hotel. The better converting phrase would be "Budget Hotel in Kuala Lumpur". The search volume is lower hence not so Generic.

This would give you a better chance at converting the phrase. You could funnel it down a bit more to "Budget Hotel Jalan Alor" Now Jalan Alor is a street. This is a lot closer to home. The chances have increased dramatically. The search volume is not high and the competition value is low. A great phrase to target to get to the first page.

Now being on the first page is great. But let's face it! the bottom of Page one is not good. You might as well shoot yourself on the foot instead of celebrating. The position your after is top 3. The click ratio increases to 33% of the total search volume. A friend of mine recently started looking after Apple Hotel in Jalan Alor. The company has some great social media strategies as you can see on their Facebook Page. However, all the pages on the site have an error in the root directory. This is considered a major problem in terms of having a clean indexable site for the keywords.

Tomorrow will dive a bit more into the bad of SEO. In the mean time feel free to go onthe Apple Hotel site and be sure to fire back some suggestions on how to improve it.