SEO4CUs: Making Friends with Google
Google’s approach to online search has helped to position them as the top leader, which has also led to companies trying to figure out how to get to the top of their page rankings. Today, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a critical component of having an online presence. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of information, misinformation, speculation, and frustration about SEO out there.
So where should the intrepid CU marketer get started?
Figure out where you are in the SEO process
Some of our CU clients are just beginning to wonder what all the numbers are about and how to make them move, some have an active SEO strategy, and some are ready for all the bells and whistles — tying together SEO and site improvement with digital and traditional marketing, competitive and market research, tracking, and even product development. Understand where you’re starting, don’t try to do everything at once, and get your website developers involved from the start.
Fortunately, you’re not starting from zero
Use Analytics, Google Business, and other tools to get a sense of where you stand and build from there. Develop SEO goals starting with the fundamentals of your brand strategy — what do you want members and prospective members to feel and discover when they use your website?
Solid SEO isn’t trickery — it’s good for your members
Google’s goal is simple: understand what humans want, and find it for them. Focus time and energy on making your site better organized, more useful, more trusted, and more engaging with more content for the human beings you serve. Remember, SEO tricks just don’t work any more.
Sorry, there’s no secret sauce.
There are some great tools available to make the process faster and easier, but SEO is not something you can plug in or automate. SEO means applying human judgement and principles to make your site more useful and trustworthy to people. Focus on things like:
- Finding and fixing technical errors
- Optimizing your site for mobile use and for speed
- Producing more relevant, useful content more often
- Better organizing existing content with headlines, subheads, links, etc.
- Editing to use smaller chunks of natural, flexible language. People “scan” when reading onscreen, and voice search is growing rapidly.
- Eliminating “hype” and “market-speak”. Use real, human language.
Get professional help
Optimizing a site is real work that requires expertise in credit unions as well as websites. We work with our clients to develop SEO goals and strategies that are realistic, sustainable, and lead to real-world results. If you’d like to discuss an SEO Audit and developing an SEO strategy that works for you, please get in touch!
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