First, I would contact some of our current and past customers and ask them how they first located our company. Did they find us through Facebook, or maybe they were on LinkedIn? Maybe they found us through an Internet search on Google, or Bing or DuckDuckGo, or maybe they found us on a video we posted on YouTube, or a guest blog post on a local real estate school website. Most small business owners assume that consumers find them exclusively through Google searches, and although Google dominates 87% of the world's search traffic, there are other marketing channels, so, that assumption is not always 100% true. For argument's sake, let us assume that a majority of our customers tell us they found us using a Google search.
Next, I would create a two-pronged marketing strategy. The first is implementing a plan that ensures my fictitious appraisal company website can be found by all the major search engines, or what is more commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The second is developing a content marketing strategy that delivers information people want to read and consume. There is a third option called "Local Search", a key topic of conversation, but one we will cover in a different article. That said, the line between SEO and Content Marketing is blurring, especially as both are highly dependent on one another to succeed. In Part 2 of this series, we will dive into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing Optimization (CMO) for your project.
