Being a founder of multiple failed startups, I always tried to find a way of cheap advertising techniques to get results with minimum investment. In this struggle, one day I came across Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and I can confidently say, it changed my life.
What is SEO?
For people who don’t know what is SEO, it is a marketing process of increasing traffic to your website through Google search results.
There are basically two types of search engine optimization; they are the on-site SEO and the off-site SEO.
· On-page SEO: This technique is implemented within your website to ensure title, description, tags, and content is optimized for the targeted keywords.
· Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO is web optimization done outside of your website. This involves article posting, directory submissions, ad-posting, social media management, and image submission etc.
My SEO Learning Phase:
When I got convinced that how much powerful SEO is in the world of advertising, I didn’t waste a moment and started learning it right away. It was very overwhelming at the first because I had a limited knowledge about this process. But when I studied deeply with the help of different guides and tutorials, I was highly impressed. I took a start from its fundamentals, in which keyword research is the most important thing for implementing SEO on your website. I searched different keywords, checked their rankings, competition, and volume through SEO tools.
SEO implementation on my Startup Berq Properties!
Berq Properties is an online real estate agency which assists buyers in purchasing property in multiple housing schemes in Pakistan. It refers leads to partner real estate agency which offers commission on every sale. After learning enough about SEO, I decided to implement it on my website.
I took the responsibility to optimize SEO and write articles, and my partner joined me as a sales professional.
Our Strategy
Our aim was to collect real estate leads through the website using SEO techniques. Our initial SEO focus was to rank our pages for the most popular real estate keywords in Pakistan which made it difficult for us to compete with older websites. (They were high competition keywords).
In the start, we managed to attract only a few hundred visitors. After a few months, I reviewed my SEO strategy, because I came to know that high competition keywords would require more resources, time and money. So I decided to work on a new strategy.
Switching to a new SEO Strategy
In my new strategy, I focused my SEO efforts on newer housing projects with low competition keywords. Since it is easy for untapped keywords to beat powerful and old websites like Zameen and Lamudi. So, whenever new real estate project launches, we ensured that we work on that untapped keyword to take the website to the top of Google search results.
During that time, one day I got a call from my partner and he informed me that a new project “Bahria Paradise” is about to launch soon. So, I immediately made a new page on my website with the same project name. Hence, the race to increase the number of visitors started. After making its page, I worked on its SEO all night long. I wrote few articles on it and backlinked it to my landing page. Furthermore, to give it an extra juice, I made a Facebook ad which sends interested users to our new page.
Finally, I was able to Beat Zameen.com and OLX.com.pk
With our continuous SEO efforts and dedication, finally, our website was showing at the top of Google search results and successfully beaten other famous websites such as Zameen.com, olx.com.pk, and bahriatown.com. It was a great achievement for us because if anyone searches Bahria Paradise Karachi, they find our website page at the top of Google searches. As most of the people prefer to click a website which is showing on the top, so this gives our page higher Clickthrough rate (CTR) and higher traffic. Our daily users were spontaneously increased from 56 to 1069, that is 1800% increase in daily visitors. Below is the screenshot of Google Analytics:
Visitors before Publishing New Keyword Content
Visitors After Publishing New Keyword Content
This helped us attracting every potential buyer fall on our website. We started to receive hundreds of calls and it didn’t stop till a month. With continuous efforts, we successfully earned million rupees in just a month by being a middleman, and our monthly sales increased 50%.
SEO Technique that Works:
From this experience, I concluded that the above SEO technique works instantly. Similarly, you can apply this technique as well, just follow the below steps:
- Research untapped keywords in your industry which have a probability of getting higher traffic volume in the future.
- Be first to publish content on a chosen keyword.
- Optimize on-site and off-site SEO for the landing page.
- Try to increase traffic on the landing page through Facebook Ads and Google AdWords.
- Increase social media shares of the landing page.
- Make sure your website is mobile optimized.
Using this trick, your SEO efforts can help give you an extra push that you need.
How can you make your businesses successful with SEO?
SEO is not a rocket science. Anyone can learn it with little knowledge of computer science and marketing. These days in our Pakistani market, good SEO experts are difficult to hire as this is something that is not taught in our universities. It’s about time that our computer science course gets digital marketing subject as a compulsory elective. Its future is bright. Print media is going to be obsolete in coming years. For a business owner, don’t be late to implement SEO, your competitors probably know about SEO, but you might have been left behind.