At first glance, this question seems incredibly silly, but at the end of the day, it really is very reasonable. For the longest time, all we ever heard was that we needed better SEO. Firms were sending us mailers with special offers to “rank our site number 1” for all these keywords. We were inundated with people telling us if we could just rank better in Google, we’d own portions of the world. Heck, I even started looking into how to build a home so I could be prepared when I purchased my own island.
We are Check Issuing. We are a premier ach processing companies. We’ve been around a while and we produce helpful articles (at least we like to think so), so we have good SEO listings. We are relevant to the nature of the search and that’s really all that matters. So why did people stop talking about SEO?
Well, they didn’t stop talking about it, they just stopped talking about it too much. SEO is important for any business. If you are a local business, you really need local listings in Google. You definitely need to work on making sure your local listings are current and working. At Check Issuing, we aren’t specific to local regions, so we care more about the general, broader market. Because our product is relevant to the searches we show up for, we are fine.
The reason you see fewer people talking about SEO is that it’s now more a hybrid situation, blending in Social Media. Social Media is critical to your brand’s traffic, as well, it helps encourage SEO rankings. SEO can determine that people enjoy your website or content based on Social Media. You are going to collect leads through SEO and Social Media, so your company’s focus should be adjusted accordingly.
For Check Issuing, we hope you find us through both Social Media and SEO!
How To Read Your Website Stats to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
Stats are one of the toughest, most misunderstood functions of the web. Something that seems like it would be so clear and self-evident is not even close to that. Web stats are robust and various in function. So how do you improve the way you and your staff interpret stats? Well, you need to start first with who you are.
We are Check Issuing. Our product’s function is to act as a third party check issuing company who also increases brand awareness of your product by placing your logos on your corporate checks. We also protect you from check fraud. Our website’s purpose is to spread the message of our product and acquire leads which will lead to new, long-term clients and relationships. And that’s how you start to read metrics, you get to know yourself in the same way.
The common mistake I see all the time with stats interpretation is that people seem to apply commonly popularized metrics to their own site and product. When people first place Google Analytics on their website, they immediately look at how many hits they got the day before and then start worrying about increasing those hits. That’s not a horrible approach, but think of this, does it really matter how many hits your site gets? Check Issuing’s website gets hits because we provide a daily log, but we aren’t Yahoo!. We couldn’t be, large news sites will simply get more hits. They need those hits to produce advertising revenue. In contrast, we need leads. Leads mean business. So really, we look for quality traffic, not volume in traffic.
If your website is trying to sell a service, focus on the metrics which matter, such as region your traffic comes from, the gender, and the age groups. You want to look at metrics which qualify your traffic with your product or service. The volume of traffic isn’t going to be that telling metric.
In the case of stats, more is not always, well, weirdly, more. More can be less if that less is higher quality. Stats are big and broad, get to know all the metrics, not just hits, and think about what you are trying to achieve. Then you can look at ways to increase those metrics and hopefully sell more products and services!
Oh don’t forget, past being Internet gurus, we are also an amazing third party check issuing company so hit us up if you are impressed!
Resources:
Search engine ranking factors
Search engines other than google
Search engines by usage rank
Should Your Company Blog to Improve Search Engine Rankings?
At Check Issuing, our blog is a pretty important part of our client (and hopefully soon to be) clients outreach. The Check Issuing motto and goal all revolves around excellent customer and client services and thus we are in the blogosphere. For us, having a blog that goes over check issuing, banking, financial and internet news helps us with that outreach. It shows we have some personality, that we are fun and that we enjoy long walks in the park (kidding, kind of…).
But should every company dive into the corporate blog sector and become a blogger? Well, like anything, it depends on your own disposition, your business, and your staff.
If you don’t have anyone who can write and become a blogger and come up with unique and appealing topics, maybe don’t start one just yet. You can find writers to help you come up with a blog post, but make sure you find someone who can do a good job and entertain or educate. You don’t want to outsource something that will be a reflection of your company only to see later that it’s pretty much garbage work. While it may not seem like potential and current clients will read your blog, trust me, they do. In fact, many people upon first hitting a website look for a blog. They do so in search of seeing some peek inside the personality of the company; something which goes beyond your basic sale’s text.
If you have nothing to say (it happens), don’t start a blog. Make sure you have some subjects lined up to post about. Don’t blog for the sake of bloging, post for the sake of entertaining and educating. Take a look at blog post you can create that further inform people about the uniqueness of your own company. Look for subjects about industry news. Look for subjects even beyond that. Blog about your office outing to the baseball game could be super fun!
If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a blog. Hey, in this case, maybe it’s time for you to look into getting a website, my friend!
At Check Issuing, our blog is important for our client services. We also like to educate folks on business processing and ach automation and our third party check disbursement software. And we like to follow financial news and hopefully tell a joke or two!
