Now is the time to be investing in your SEO strategy as having a strong organic ranking will help you remain competitive, prevent you losing leads to competitors and increase your margin. Over the next month, we’re going to be sharing with you a series of SEO to increase your ranking.
Enabling SSL on your landing pages
Google now consider SSL as a key ranking factor so it’s essential that you enable SSL on your sites as soon as possible. If you haven’t already done this, follow our simple guide on how to enable SSL.
It’s important to note that when you enable SSL on your sites, your app URL (e.g. app.justsingles.com) will no longer rank. This is because when we apply the changes to make your landing pages SSL secure, we’ll mark the application pages for those sites as ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’ to avoid being penalised for affiliate bridging.
As a result, it’s really important that you invest in improving the organic ranking of your core domains to ensure you don’t see any negative impact.
Moving to HTTPS
After changing your sites to HTTPS, you should make sure that you add the HTTPS versions of your site to webmaster tools and search console to enable Google to crawl them.
To avoid losing your organic ranking, Google recommend using a 301 redirect for your HTTP URL as it’s a permanent redirect – a 302 redirect is temporary.
The impact a strong SEO strategy can have
As a marketer, you should never underestimate the value of a dedicated SEO strategy. It should be at the forefront of your mind and should be considered as important as your paid and optimisation strategy.
Here are some examples of how some of our partners achieve consistent growth and healthy margins through their SEO strategy.
Partner A is one of our top tier partners and sees consistent and steady growth. 25% of their traffic is organic, which adds 19% to their affordable cost per lead (CPL). This is essential in allowing them to be competitive and attain top ad spots but more importantly, it increases their margin significantly.
To this partner, investment in their SEO strategy is equally as important as their paid acquisition.
Partner B began investing in a new traffic source in February which added 15% to their paid acquisition leads. Their organic presence for brand searches and niched search terms saw their SEO traffic rise in line with their paid traffic volume. Naturally, not everyone who sees an advert will click at that initial point, however, they might search for the brand the following hour, day, week or month. They may not necessarily remember the brand specifically but will be able to search for a term closely linked to the brand in a bid to find it.
The halo effect from paid acquisition is significant and therefore without a solid organic strategy you may find that you lose leads to competitors.
When it comes to acquisition, SEO is just as important as paid advertising. If you need to turn your traffic off tomorrow and you have a solid SEO strategy in place, you should still see a solid number of high quality, consistent leads coming to your site.
Invest in building the foundations of your acquisition strategy now and you’ll see the results later.
Keep an eye out in our next newsletter for tips on which tools you can use to assist your strategy.