There’s Way More Than Two Ways to Make Money with SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves boosting the number of visitors to a website through organic (natural) or unpaid methods rather than paid ones. It also aims at improving the quality of the traffic to the sites, thus getting the most suitable visitors who are most likely to be converted.
The goal of SEO is to make a website or webpage more visible to the users of a search engine such as Google or any other.
There are several strategies that are adapted to optimize a website. Some of the SEO tactics include improving the content, adding content, using backlinks, and many others.
It is also important to make a site friendlier to view on mobile devices so that many people can access it.
The reason for this is that most browsing is happening from handheld devices nowadays, thus being mobile friendly plays a significant role in making a site rank higher in search engines.
Seth’s two ways to make money with SEO
While talking about the broad subject of “How to Make Money with SEO”, the renowned marketing figure, Seth Godin, gave the following list of two business opportunities that one can take advantage of with SEO:
- Achieve top position in relation to a highly popular and competitive keyword that brings new visitors to your website
- Make it to high ranks with your branded search items that attract many visitors by employing search engines as the basic navigational device
More Than Two Ways to Make Money with SEO
However, Seth’s list seems incomplete and he left out some things. SEO as a way of increasing the number of visitors to a site becomes useful where it intersects with ways of making money online.
two ways to make money with SEO
SEO goals for adding value
Website owners initially optimize their sites with the goal of ranking for specific keywords aimed at attracting customers. However, they later come to realize that there are other benefits like branding, dealing with reputation, and getting raw traffic, all of which are of value.
Here are several applications of SEO:
Using SEO to generate raw traffic which can be monetized
Site owners optimize their sites and come up with keyword-targeted content which generates traffic from search engines.This then moves to content sharing, driving of more direct traffic, and referring links with more and more people using and enjoying the material.
With this traffic, thousands of sites get a good opportunity and make use of it to advertise, thereby directly cashing in on the traffic that comes from search engines.
Web advertising has emerged as a lucrative industry and includes services like affiliate marketing, banner ads, and contextual services such as Google’s AdWords.
This SEO application is suitable in cases where you can make money without any action or transactions on your site, and this is best utilized by advertising.
Online marketers need to create great content that targets interesting or commonly-searched terms. Rather than aiming at optimizing particular terms, the focus should be on giving the site wide accessibility through the best practices.
To achieve this goal, the site should have a good structure and use various tactics to get the most out of the content.
On-page optimization should be applied and the content should be easy to share as well as being viral-spreading optimized.
Applying SEO for e-commerce sales
Driving traffic to e-commerce sites to increase sales is one of the most direct ways of monetizing SEO.
Traffic from search engines (through SEO) is high quality since the visitors have already expressed interest by their specific queries, so if the product or brand matches the search, the conversion rate is normally quite high.
Site owners can apply SEO to this goal when they have specific items for sale on their site.
To achieve this goal, online marketers need to find those keywords that have high traffic and conversion rates through testing them for effectiveness.
It is crucial to find queries that are specific to the product, brand, or whatever is being sold to increase chances of the traffic buying. The e-commerce site will need top-notch link building as well as internal optimization to be highly rated for competitive and high-value keywords, which generate traffic that is easy to convert.
It is advisable to engage SEO experts to optimize such sites so they are as productive and profitable as possible. Such experts could also help in achieving other SEO objectives.
two ways to make money with SEO
Employing SEO for lead generation and direct marketing
This goal is not as direct as e-commerce sales, but generating leads through websites or online presence is equally crucial for getting clients and increasing revenue.
It is so obvious that a significant portion of queries running into millions is aimed at a commercial intention, despite that they cannot be fulfilled directly online particularly at that time.
Searches such as legal services, health care, provision of finance like loans, and many others that people look for online are examples of queries with commercial intentions.
SEO is employed for lead generation and direct marketing when site owners have non-e-commerce goal or goods or services that they are not selling online but want to attract and gain customers through their website or other online channels.
For the success of this objective, the same strategy is used with e-commerce sales, including getting keywords that convert well, generate substantial traffic, and have previously shown good performance in pay-per-click campaigns.
It is crucial to use a good combination of on-page optimization and external backlinking with suitable anchor text to direct traffic to the site, especially in highly competitive areas.
Applying SEO to manage reputation
Businesses and individuals grappling with negative publicity or non-existent online information about themselves could feel so much in need of filling search results with positive stuff and links. That is how SEO comes in and helps achieve the goal by creating and promoting content by link building.
The whole concept of reputation management using SEO is one of the most difficult SEO tasks as it involves optimizing many and not one result for a query.
As such it is highly demanded, very lucrative and has a significant number of practitioners. Read get free content for your company’s blog
With this goal, the keyword that is used is the brand name, personal name or some popular variant, which is obviously known by the site owner/client. Also, using keyword search tools can be a good idea to find if there is any variant being missed out in the optimization.
For optimization, it will involve using many domains to push negative results as much as possible to the bottom of the SERPs. Some domains used includes Social media profiles, press releases, public relations, and links from sites that the person/business dealing with reputation owns or controls.
Those are employed together with serious internal links and on-page optimization.
Using SEO for branding
Although it is not a popular application of SEO, it can be used for branding purposes. It is possible to leverage the high ranking in the search engines and the exposure it offers to push one’s brand recognition and authority.
This idea has been perfectly utilized by bloggers, content producers, social media sites, news channels, and many other online marketplaces.
To achieve this objective, the idea of ad repetition so as to get into buyer’s consideration set is used so online marketers ensure a site remains on top of the search engine result page in relation to a particular subject.
Consequently, the top ranking creates a positive effect on the traffic, gets into their consideration and increases their perceived authority of the site or item being pushed.
The online marketer should choose keywords that are highly likely to direct the traffic that they want, and who will most likely remember their site or brand.
The SEO strategies to achieve this are so much for getting raw traffic- have a good site structure especially the links, make the site accessible and concentrate more on links that will give domain authority but not focusing more on specific keywords.
Conclusion
When it comes to making money with SEO, there are many ways of doing it, and not just two. Some of the ways include using SEO to boost e-commerce sales, generating raw traffic which can be monetized through advertising, marketing and other methods, and using applying SEO to generate leads as well as direct marketing.
Additionally, SEO can be used to make money through managing reputation, and for creating brand awareness and authority. With all businesses working on getting an effective and productive online presence, SEO is certainly going to be the next big thing.
