SEO Explained by a Marine Marketing Agency
Integrating and maintaining a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is vital to the success of your marine business. You will rank high in search results, as well as gain organic traffic that converts into leads and revenue increases.
What is SEO and how will it help your marine business grow?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to consumers who are looking for your product or service. SEO improves the unpaid or organic website traffic results and excludes direct traffic/visitors and online paid advertisement tactics (Pay Per Click, Social Media Marketing, etc..).
SEO is intimidating if you are just beginning to learn about it. Many marine business owners underestimate the time and effort it takes. Your business will get out what you put in. If you only spend a few minutes trying to understand and implement your SEO strategy, your business will not climb the ranks in today’s competitive landscape.
Understanding Different Types of SEO
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO involves optimizing your marine website with keywords and relevant content. Add keywords and content that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo can crawl & effectively categorize. Content like images with text on it does not help you rank with SEO as the crawlers are unable to crawl images. If the content is not in a format (text) that the crawlers can read search engines will not rank or show your business to consumers via search results pages. This also involves keyword research and understanding barriers that will get in the way of search engines.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO involves marketing a website by increasing the number of backlinks and/or inbound links. Having these links present on 3rd party channels will allow for more potential leads to find your business, visit your website, and convert. Several types of content can be created as part of your offsite SEO tactics to help promote your website and marine business. Some of these include:
- Posting to Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
- Promote your existing content (cross-channel promotions, PPC ads, encourage viewers to share)
- Engage and respond consistently on social media
- Take part in webinars and podcasts & asking the hosts to link back to your site
- Create and distribute press releases and newsletters that include links to your site
Local SEO
In today’s day and age, many consumers like to buy locally – the marine industry isn’t exempt from this.
Local SEO connects businesses to users looking for products and services near their physical location.
Listings and citations on places like Google Maps, Bing Places, Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc. help prospects in your area find you.
Whether you are a boat dealership, boat rental business, or boat club, it’s vital that your business appears in key business directories so that users can find you easily and all your business information is listed accurately.
Technical SEO
While keywords are often the focus of the discussion when talking about SEO, a slow website also affects it. Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the crawling, indexing, and rendering phase of your website and other web properties to achieve higher search rankings.
It improves the technical aspects of your website to help it rank, and it covert SEO topics including but not limited to:
- Sitemaps
- Crawling and indexing
- Mobile optimization
- Site speed
- Site structure
- SSL certificates
- Image optimization
- Internal and external links
Request a FREE SEO Audit
Boat Marketing Pros is a marine marketing agency that helps marine businesses with their websites and digital marketing. Schedule an SEO audit with one of our experts.
