Being a consultant, your profession revolves around helping and advising people. But be it the HR, financial, managerial, IT or even strategy consultancy, all could a fair share of advice themselves. Especially when it comes to marketing their services.
Many consultants and firms still use the traditional marketing methods and depend on word-of-mouth or other offline marketing to establish their hold in the industry. Online marketing for them is building a flashy website and waiting for leads
Of course, these are also the ones who do not make it big. Ask any successful consultant and they’ll tell you how a big chunk of their clientele comes via their focus on online marketing. And also, how they swear by building a top presence in the internet as their primary marketing tool.
This is where the magic of SEO (Search engine optimization) comes in. A good SEO will give your service an insane amount of spotlight by bringing it to the top of Google’s result page every time a user searches for consultancy services online.
SEO practically saves a ton of your marketing expenses because it’s an all-in-one approach. Once you get to the top of the result’s page, you’re already getting 90% more prospective traffic than before!
But of course, you’ll only be successful if your SEO is top-notch. Just adding flimsy keywords are waiting for it to take off is a pipe dream.
This guide will walk you through some features you need to make your SEO effective and hard-hitting.
6 SEO tips to make your consultancy website a success.
There’s a big difference between SEO and great SEO. And you’ll know the difference from the results they bring. Follow the 5 tips discussed below to ensure that you are set on a path of greatness.
Check on your competitors
Research is vital component of SEO. Proper and thorough research should be done before implementing or even crafting an SEO strategy and plan of action. The information you gather from this research is your guiding light to build the effective strategy that works best for you.
A big part of your pre-requisite research should focus on your competitors in the consultancy industry and how they’re doing. Noting their SEO techniques and success factors will give you more insight into what methods and features have now been overused. Or even, what keywords are found in almost every website. This gives you the perfect opportunity to stand out and be a recognizable face in the crowd. Once you get the hang of what worked for your competitors and what didn’t, your job will get much simpler when it comes to deciding on your approach. Moreover, sufficient research about your competition will let you know where you stand in the consultancy market currently and the amount of competition that you need to beat. This is bound to give you a boost of motivation. Two birds with one stone!
Rename your images
This is a hidden-gem of a feature. Quite literally. What many consultants like to do is use attractive and flashy images in their website and blog posts to spice up their look and make their web presence more entertaining and lighter. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that (unless of course, you tend to go overboard). But what they don’t realise is that these images also have to mean something to Google.
You see, Google’s algorithm doesn’t look at pictures, it reads them. Yes, your pictures all have a name no matter where you bring them from. They come with a pre-existing title. This is what Google’s algorithm reads to understand what the image is. Now this image text is more often than not just randomly generated characters, figures and numbers. The algorithm is bound to be put off if they come across something like that, affecting your potential ranking in the results page.
This makes it imperative for you to check and edit the text (called the Alt-text) of every image and animation you use in your content and website, and make it so that it will help you rank better rather than worse!
Focus on your URL
Your URL is what brings people to your website. It’s the web address to your site and Google uses it to determine and understand what your site is talking about and what information you’re trying to provide. So, this is what Google uses to categorize your size and puts into your specific niche of the consulting services, for example.
Your job here is to make sure that your URL is clear and crisp, and not a mess. It should not be very long and possibly containing your most relevant keywords. A good rule of thumb is to put your more important keywords in the first few words of the URL, followed by the rest in order of their importance. But again, it should not be too keyword heavy so that it starts looking forced and cramped up.
Next, the URL should be perfectly describing your web page, whatever page it is on. Google uses it to make sense of a particular page and tries to find a path. Another thing to note is the importance of hyphens in your URL. You can use them two separate two words and not lose any meaning. This makes your web address look professional and neat, while not sacrificing on the keywords you really wanted.
Create informative content
Google rewards important and relevant content. Your content is your way to tell Google that you’re authoritative. That you know your stuff and are not just some random business who wanted a website to look cool. Keep your content relevant to your consultancy service though. Try to conjure up hot topics and answer questions which you think your clients would want answered. Stand on their shoes and start thinking like them. Think about what information would make you trust a consultancy service as a client. Boom! There’s your blog post.
It’s equally important to stay consistent, too. You can’t just send out a blog post or an article and then go into hibernation. Your delivery of information needs to be regular and top-notch. Every overnight success has had years of sleepless nights before that one night. You’ll eventually find your content going viral, your website getting the traffic you dreamed of. This is when you’ll know, your hard work has in fact paid off. Your website has reached a top rank in Google results. And it’ll all be worth it.
A good trick to speed up this process is to give the readers content that they would want to come back to. Maybe begin a gripping short series of related, informational content that your prospects would love to know more about. These short, crisp articles can be a fun, yet still a productive read. A dopamine release along with information intake.
What more could a visitor want?
Deep dive in your keywords
Using keywords is one thing. But diving into the past, present and future of their usage is another. You can skim the ground, run a few ordinary searches and find a few mainstream keywords. But that’s what they’ll be. Mainstream. Ordinary. Especially for your consultancy industry, you get a lot of options to play with your keywords. If you find a word that you think is a possible keyword, pull out the thesaurus and look for its synonyms. There’s your modified keyword.
Another way to make your SEO structure off-beat is to use long-tail keywords instead of the normal 1-2 worders. Dig in and you’ll find phrases that will be a goldmine for your website. Using these phrases will set you apart from your short-form keyword competition and give you a slight edge over the crowd. There’s nothing wrong with using the most common keywords as well, but why graze on a field which is already crowded?
Get professional help
If you’re going to go, go all the way. Don’t be of the idea that you can just implement SEO to your website on your own by doing some overtime. It’s an extensive and intricate process. If you really want to witness the real SEO magic, you need to get a professional agency to help you out. This will ensure that your website is brushed up with only the best and most up dated SEO practices and is free from any beginner mistake that could mess up your strategy. Moreover, this makes the process much cheaper and quicker for you. It’s a win-win.
Reach out and we’ll make your consultancy business reach new heights!
ignicious has been recognized as one of Top Local SEO Agencies by DesignRush
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Melissa How
Thanks for sharing this content. Really interesting seo tips. thanks for share to all.