Marketing for Professional Services

Starting an SEO strategy can be overwhelming for any marketer. It can be even more difficult if you work for architecture, engineering, or construction company that sells professional services rather than digital or tangible products. 

Over the years, I have learned many SEO strategies from various podcasts, articles, and consultants. I also helped design and implement local optimizations for my husband’s new company, which ended up winning first place in my husband’s audience category. From this experience, we learned a lot about ethical and organic SEO, as well as other unethical strategies used by some of our competitors.

Several people have asked about SEO specifics, so I wanted to share some SEO basics to consider before looking at your strategies or hiring an SEO consultant. 

Before any company help with your digital marketing efforts, it is always smart to know the basics. There are many great SEO consultants, but there are also many quacks. Also, we don’t know how many of them specialize in our industry.

What is it?

Let’s start with the basics, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. This may be a new concept to you but it is straightforward. Search engines like Google crawl all websites and present search results in the order they think is relevant to the person performing the search. When developing your SEO strategy, you want to use organic search results to increase the volume and quality of traffic to your website. The theory is that if search engines put you at the top of the list, searchers are more likely to click on your site.

Goals for SEO

The main goal of SEO is to get your business in front of potential clients that are looking for your types of services. Let’s analyze it in more detail.

• Quality Traffic. It can attract thousands of website visitors, but if you’re visiting the site because Google says you’re a resource for medical devices, it’s not good traffic when you’re an architect designing hospitals. You want to make sure that only people that are looking for your services find your website and turn into potential clients. 
• Increase Traffic. Even better if the right visitors come to your site. 
• Organic results. The goal of SEO is to get additional eligible traffic to your site in the form of organic content. This means that Google doesn’t have to pay for ad space or ads.