Have you heard of the four Ps of search engine optimization (SEO)? They’re actually the same as the four Ps of marketing, just with an SEO focus added:
Product
Product covers the goods and services that a company sells, which can encompass physical products, digital products, or services.
SEO strategies should be built around optimizing the content that promotes these products and services in a clear, concise way for the benefit of users and search engine algorithms.
Price
Price refers to the cost of the company’s goods and services. Pricing strategies are determined by what the company deems each product or service’s value should be and what customers are willing to pay to receive it.
With the right SEO strategies for pricing content, you can boost or improve traffic and gain more conversions. For some companies, especially those with ecommerce sites, optimizing pricing information for search engines is a necessity. For other companies that offer custom pricing, including the price of a product or service may not be necessary or possible. It’s important to optimize the pricing content based on circumstances and what will and will not be effective with audiences.
Place
Place refers to the locations where your products and services are available to your customers. Maybe you have one store or office location and serve customers in and around that location. Or, perhaps you have multiple locations within a region, throughout the state, or across the nation. No matter your situation, each service area is considered your “place.”
When it comes to place-related SEO, creating a strong local SEO strategy is invaluable for boosting your organic rankings on search engines and increasing your visibility/brand awareness among your target audience in each location. Local SEO is all about targeting users in the areas you serve through efforts like optimizing your Google Business Profile, adding optimized location pages to your website, and ensuring all your business listings are correct online.
Promotion
Promotion is the effort you make to promote your brand, products, and services to your audience. In other words, it’s your marketing, and how you market your business matters. There are plenty of marketing channels to consider, including search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, traditional advertising, and others.
Promoting yourself on Google and improving your SEO ranking in relevant Google searches are critical to your marketing efforts, which can be accomplished through well-planned, well-strategized SEO.
So, there you have it—the four Ps of SEO.
Wait. There is a 5th P that we haven’t mentioned yet: Patience.
The 5th P of SEO: Patience
Although we live in an age where instant gratification is commonplace, patience is a critical factor in SEO because SEO does not yield instant results. SEO is a long game with many benefits that appear over time.
It can be hard to keep patience in mind when evaluating your website performance and SEO efforts. It often feels like the needle isn’t moving or isn’t moving far enough, even though you are putting plenty of time, money, and effort into optimizing your online presence. While progress can seem slow and not worth the price, the value of maintaining patience and staying persistent will pay off.
Why Is Patience Required for SEO?
SEO is a beneficial but slow-moving, ongoing process. There are several factors at play that make it such a maintenance-heavy value over time, including:
Reason #1: The Google Algorithm Is Ever-Changing
Google’s search engine algorithm is highly complex and is constantly evolving, with new updates made every single day. That’s right. Experts estimate that the Google algorithm undergoes an update 500-600 times a year, meaning it is altered once or even multiple times a day. The majority of these updates are minor and insignificant to how the algorithm ranks search results. But every now and then—roughly four or five times a year—Google will make a core update to the algorithm that significantly changes the way websites rank in the searches.
These major changes require the algorithm to recrawl, reevaluate, and re-index web pages according to its new standards. And while Google crawlers are constantly crawling, it can still take time for them to reach your site.
Plus, it’s important to understand the details of each major update and see if your web content still aligns with Google’s new ranking factors or needs to be reworked, which also requires time and continued effort.
Reason #2: Increasing Domain Authority Requires Time
Your domain authority matters for SEO and is determined by evaluating how long your domain has been around, how many backlinks you have earned since your site launched, how well your content benefits visitors, and how engaged users are with your site when they land on it, among other factors.
The SEO software, Moz, was one of the first to evaluate all such factors and create a prediction for how authoritative or relevant Google might consider a website to be. This prediction was presented in the form of a score between 0 and 100, 100 being the highest possible score a site could earn. Your domain authority score helps determine your site’s potential to rank high or low on search engine results pages (SERPs).
New sites or sites that are not well-optimized for SEO are naturally going to have a low domain authority score. However, the longer your domain is around, the more effort you make to create high-quality content, the more engaging you are with visitors via your site, and the more backlinks you earn, the more likely you are to improve your authority score.
Reason #3: Producing Quality SEO Content Takes Time and Consistency
High-quality, valuable, SEO-focused content is essential for your website. However, to significantly enhance your web traffic, it takes more than a well-written home page and well-written service or location pages. The way to really optimize your site’s content is to produce new content on a routine basis.
A well-maintained blog with articles that offer useful, informative value to your visitors will likely improve organic web traffic over time for two main reasons:
- A collection of quality blog articles demonstrates to Google’s algorithm your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) on topics related to your market or industry. Google considers each of these components valuable when ranking web pages on the SERPs. The higher your content’s E-E-A-T quality is, the more likely Google is to rank your articles high in web searches, boosting your likelihood of increasing your web traffic.
- Informed and informative articles, especially those that rank high on the SERPs, will attract users who are interested in the topics you cover. As a result, you’ll likely increase your traffic, improve your domain authority score, support your effort to gain conversions, and ultimately boost sales.
It can be time-consuming to research and write blog articles once a week, twice a month, or even once a month. However, the value they add to your website is significant. Plus, quality articles appreciate over time, making them a worthwhile investment now.
Patience Now = SEO Success Tomorrow
Conquering SEO can feel like an uphill battle, and in a way, it is. While no one is ever going to fully “conquer” the always-present, ever-changing beast that is SEO, you can work to harness the power of SEO to outperform competitors in your market or industry.
And when it comes to battle, Leo Tolstoy said it best: “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” As you work to build your online presence and optimize all facets of your website and digital presence for better ranking on the search engines, two of your greatest weapons are going to be patience and time.
Your third weapon should be a partnership with a team of skilled SEO experts who stay on top of the trends and changes that impact ranking and help you remain patient as your SEO efforts flourish—a team like M&R Marketing!
Improving your SEO can feel a lot like a game of “hurry up and wait.” But with enough patience and a partnership with M&R, you’ll see the value of your SEO efforts in no time.
SEO is an ever-evolving, ever-crucial component of digital marketing that requires thoughtful strategy and patience to benefit from it significantly. Remaining patient with your SEO can be a challenge, but the SEO pros at M&R make the process much easier. Not only do we help clients create effective strategies to boost performance on search engines like Google, but we also monitor performance, provide valuable insights, and help formulate solutions for improvement whenever we see room to strengthen strategies further.
Call 478-621-4491 or contact one of our business development managers today to learn more about what our SEO solutions can do for you.
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