SEO Training Part 1

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Rocket Science of Finding Clients Series

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The Rocket Science of Finding Clients - Part 1: Tend to the Fuel Tank

A Healthy Contact List Is the Fuel for Your Client Growth

A lot is being said lately about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a way to increase your site traffic and attract more new clients. If your site is optimized so that when your market audience enters a search word, say, in Google, and your site comes up in the top ten, that is the holy grail of SEO. I've included the top 10 SEO tactics below, and they are effective. Using a few of them, I came up 1st----no lie, 1st----on Google in a marketing search category. That's mission impossible, but I did it: "Marketing help, advice, strategy and service".

That little SEO victory was fun, but when you think about it, if everyone religiously follows the top 10 SEO rules, it will just raise the bar, and all but 10 will still disappear from Google page 1. There's got to be a better way of getting attention and attracting new clients and, fortunately, there is!

I call the better way "organic list growth".

In short, the strategy is to:

1. Create your own organic community or market niche audience.
2. Send your audience a powerfully valuable email message on a regular basis (as I'm sending this powerfully valuable email message to my own audience of business owners who want to find more clients).

Rather than playing around with Google's top 10, grow your own audience--people who need the problem-solving expertise that is your specialty. When you regularly drip valuable help, advice and strategy to this niche audience, they are more likely to regularly open your emails, regularly experience your value, regularly thank you and regularly be thinking of you when they think about their need for the kind of service you provide. Finally, and most importantly, they are more likely to regularly knock at your door, regularly purchase your service and products, and regularly refer their friends to you.

Get the theme word "regularly"?

Your consistent valuable messages to your own organically grown niche audience community result in consistent valuable requests for your services and products.

Whether you're a doctor, attorney, painter, coach, realtor or massage therapist, this organic client growth strategy is most powerful. To put this strategy into action, you will first need to create a comprehensive client/contact list. Who gets on the list? Anyone with whom you have had personal contact. You think you don't know many people? Think again!

1. All clients.
2. All contacts: Everyone in your email address book.
3. Members of professional groups you attend: Professional associations, chamber of commerce, networking group, the sailing club, parent-teacher club, model airplane enthusiast club where you are an active member.

Most people are surprised to find that the above contacts number from 300-600 or more! This is your seed contact list.

Imagine how your regular valuable contact with these people will attract business to you over and over again. This contact list is the fuel for your business growth!

Import all these names into an Excel Spreadsheet under the column headings:

• [fname]
• [lname]
• [email]

These three headings are all you need. Get this list together and update it at least monthly.

You'll regularly add to the list by:

• Having a contact capture form on every page of your website.
• Creating incentive for people to register on that list (see the form in the upper left column of my website).
• Immediately importing all those business cards you receive at all live events you attend. Get in the habit of carrying your business cards everywhere and exchanging contact information with everyone you meet.
• When you speak before a live audience, offer the incentive gift that you offer on your website. Pass around a clipboard for all who want the gift to sign: First Name, Last Name, Email.

Do these things, and within a year I guarantee your list will be above 1000 and growing!

Did you know that every name on your well farmed contact list is worth at least $50 per year in business? 600 names = at least $30,000/year!

You can now have fun adding more people to your list and strategizing how to increase the average return per list member. Once you have your core list, you will begin to refine the list to more eligible clients. It's like creating your own high-grade business growth fuel.

So there you have it!

#1 Client Growth Principle: A Healthy Contact List Is the Fuel for Your Client Growth

• How full is your fuel tank?

• What quality grade is the fuel?

Ask yourself these two questions every morning for the next 7 days and listen to the answers that come to mind.

What will you do this week to improve the answers to the above questions?

Before moving on to Client Growth Principle #2, here are the top 10 SEO strategies as promised:

Top 10 SEO Strategies

1. Select a strategic search term that you can "win". It's so much easier to be #1 locally than world-wide! Do this by conducting local search engine advertising (Pay Per Click). Google and Yahoo allow you to create ads that appear only to people in your area. Also, place local city names in your key words (see key words below).

2. Name graphics and flash for SEO. Search engines can't read graphics, but they can read the graphic file name. Look at the names of my graphic files--right click on any picture on my site and select "Properties". You'll see the words Marketing help, advice, strategy and service in each graphic file name.

3. Name your web folders. This certainly increases the length of the web address for each page, but the search engines love it. See the address for any of my pages and you'll see the folder names contain...guess what..."Marketing Help, Advice, Strategy and Service.

4. Name each page uniquely. Each page has a "Title Tag". That's what shows up in the browser bar and also shows up in that short google search engine summary (the top 10 list). I'm still in the process of doing this on my site--imagine the results when that's done!

5. Create relevant content. Keep your content relevant to your market. You'll notice my site is all about how to find clients. Period. You won't find trail running and mountain climbing stories--though these are great personal interests (at least, not in the visible pages!!). I'm not selling "wonder cream" on the side...etc.

6. Have inbound links. You can place thousands of links to other sites on your site, but that will not increase your search engine ratings. The search engines only look for links on other sites that point to your site!

7. Create a site map: Place, on one page, the links to every page on your site along with the page titles (#4 above). This makes it easier for search engines to "crawl" your entire site. I haven't done this yet on my site.

8. Create keyword density. The number of times a keyword appears on a page divided by the total word count on that page = Keyword Density 7. But note: Don't stuff keywords onto the page irrelevantly. The search engines hate that, and will penalize you!

9. Be a "long-timer". The longer your site has been up, and the further into the future you have it registered, the higher your search engine ratings. Therefore, don't abandon your current site for a new domain name every time you get a new idea.

10. Employ reverse archeology. Come up with keywords that your target audience is likely to use in a keyword search, and then create relevant content on your site. Yahoo Search Marketing has a great little keyward popularity tool you can use for free 50 times to find what key words you audience is searching. Google has one you can use limitless times.

And here's an 11th, 12th and 13th bonus SEO strategy:

11. Have the keyword your visitor searches come up in the text on your page. This means that that page title they saw on Google (see #4 above) is also the title front and center on your page. No confusion they came to the right place.

12. Employ social networking. Spend ten minutes a day consistently on Twitter, Facebook and others. I'm getting organic list sign-ups through those media. But note: If you don't have an organic list mechanism implemented, you can Twitter all day long, and it will be like trying to hold water in a sieve.

13. Purchase local place name domains and forward them to your website. Target any area from which you would like to attract clients and buy domains with a key search word for your business plus the name of a local city. Then forward those domains to your website. For example, you are a New York financial advisor and want to target San Francisco: Buy the domain San-Francisco-Investment-Help.com and forward it to your website (of course, you already bought up all your local NY cities and towns). The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

In conclusion, though I have only thoroughly completed 2, 3, and 5 above, I still achieved a high rank early on. Imagine what it will be like when I've got all 13 (of the top 10--ha!) implemented on my site!

Even so, the real gold is not in SEO, but in growing your organic niche community. That's where I put my main effort to fill my contact list marketing fuel tank. But I also have fun, in the meantime, playing the SEO game.

1st Insight Communications Internet Marketing has a powerful and economical "Do it Yourself" Search Engine Optimization program and 3 convenient levels of customed Search Engine Optimization services. Turn your Search Engine Optimization over to the experts, freeing yourself to put your energy into your own area of professional expertise.