How SEO Promotes Word-of-Mouth Sales

SEO Advantages (In Laymans Terms)

Admittedly the guru who taught me SEO (search engine optimization) wasn’t your average geek. The “organic white hat marketing” fundamentals that were taught by my favorite expert circa 2000 started with basic understanding of good business sales in general. He explained that the number one form of customers to any business will always remain worth-of-mouth even if more than 80% of customers purchase their products online.

The philosophy behind this superior understanding of SEO depicts the reality that most customers talk to their friends, see an ad or two, and then one day they have the money and need for said product or service and that’s when they go to the internet and look for the easiest way to get their hands on it, whether it’s a local store or Amazon that they’ll buy from depends on their personal preferences, speed of acquisition and sales price.

“Good Organic White Hat SEO” -What?

That means that good organic white hat search engine optimization starts with the philosophical understanding of customer interaction in general and how people become website visitors when they’re ready to purchase a product.

Once someone is prepared to buy a set product or service the first place they go today is their cell phone, and guess what app is on every cell phone today from Android to iPhones?

You Got It – The Google Search Engine!

This is why it’s so important to understand the customer acquisition process for your business whether you sell products online or have local services, B2B or a retail marketplace. 

The bottom line is that once a business has enough quality relevant presence on the internet, unless it takes more than 6 seconds for the average visitor to find what they’re looking for on the page The business ranked at the top of search inevitably will get the sale.

Achieving Superior Business Presence

To achieve successful digital marketing today there are literally hundreds of factors that go into establishing a quality presence on the internet, and this is by definition what I’m referring to as search engine optimization.

Whether you’re on Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it, all of these systems are search engines with their own user interfaces, machine learning, and indexed landing pages contextually organized for the viewers ultimate pleasure.

Once your business has established a presence in the majority of these search engines whether it’s locally, regionally, statewide, nationally, and even internationally that is when sales will be at their optimum. When a friend mentions a product they bought via a word of mouth conversation, the average customer researches their product from their computer, tablet, or most often a cell phone. 

How Often Do Your Customers Check Their Phone?

Since the average customer checks their phone or their computer every time they’re about to go to a store and purchase something new, even after they’ve already heard about it via word-of-mouth from a friend, it’s extremely important that your business products and services have an online presence, so that when your future customers look online, they don’t see your competitor first, you want them to see you first!

Just because you have the best chocolate in town doesn’t mean you can attract your best customers by local word of mouth alone because different crowds hang in different circles. News circulation doesn’t work the way it used to either, most paper articles are extremely demographic, and the actual conversion rates are less than 1% because they’re not “targeted visitors”.

Arggggghhh! (Social Distancing Destroys Word-Of-Mouth Sales)

Not to mention that today with social distancing, many locals have no idea what products and services are available to them nearby, or how much they cost without hopping on the internet one way or another.

When someone hears about a good product or service they don’t necessarily bug their friend about all the details they mostly need to know if it’s worth buying then they’ll do their phone due diligence and figure out how they can get to the cheapest.

How Does Social Distancing Affect Your Business?

“To stay safe and healthy, stay at home as much as possible, until the pandemic is over!”

With social distancing in place many people search online stores like Amazon first, and only if they know they can get something locally quick and easy and close do they go out to shop. Anyone  who is looking for a secure way to shop today searches on the internet first before they go out and buy the product themselves.

There are many strategies available via search engine optimization to make sure your business gets seen before your future customers will see an amazon product. This is because more customers search for an Amazon product from Google, than they do directly on Amazon, so as long as you’re ranking well enough to be seen at a local level, in search first, you’ll actually sell your products and services before Amazon can!

Realistically, traditional sales and marketing strategies have changed a lot over the last two decades, and unless your business is popping up on Google you’re missing out on a large majority of potential customers that may be paying more are going further away than they have to, when if only they knew about your products or services, they’d come straight to your place to shop, so long as it was convenient enough they will choose you your business and be shopping at your store right now.

Good SEO Is Complicated Business…

Gaining effective business exposure from SEO is not as simple as just tossing up a do-it-yourself website or throwing up a Facebook page, if you want to boost your sales with good online digital marketing you’ll have to have a thorough search engine optimization campaign.

If you do enough research it is possible to achieve results on your own but someone with decades of experience will have a lot better results far quicker and since SEO can take months or even years to establish a successful online presence you’ll have to update your content as often as possible and keep the ball rolling on your SEO campaign 24/7 365 if you want to keep up with your competition.

SEO Is For Life (If You Want Maximum Sales)

A truly effective strategic search engine optimization campaign lasts for the lifetime of the business and goes hand and hand with the evolution of sales and customer service operations. If you need a hand with your SEO I’m always here to help you out and I’ll consult with you directly to make sure you get the best results possible to increase sales for your business.

Why SEO Promotes Word Of Mouth Sales (Continued)

Although you will have to dump a lot of time or capital to produce a successful initial campaign if you combine your SEO campaign with a full house of digital marketing strategies including advertising such as PPC ads you’ll be able to attain sales in as early as the first week. If you work with me directly we will budget a portion of your investment to where immediate digital advertising that will taper off as our SEO campaign grows the sales of the business.

Believe it or not there are dozens of digital technologies I can think of off the top of my head that I’ve personally used which have helped boost word of mouth sales for a whole variety of different types of businesses. I can give you some solid examples, and different online tools work best for certain types of companies.

One universal digital marketing campaign that I’m sure you’ve heard of long before the internet came about if you’ve been a business owner for a while is referral marketing such as coupons Digital coupons can be accessed virtually from nearly anywhere and even share it amongst cell phone users. Another form of referral marketing online is incentivized referral marketing to increase reviews or offering someone a discount if they refer a friend. The way the review promotion system works is you offer someone a rebate or coupon if they take the time to give you a review on Google, Facebook, etc. The more good reviews you have for your business the more organic traffic that you’ll tend to discover for your business. This is specially helps with local products and services but it also applies to all online products and services because the marketplace is so broad from Amazon to eBay.

Another commonly misunderstood component for successful SEO that helps increase your value to customers and online visitors is blogging, which is still quite useful for business marketing, in fact one of the main factors that Google uses to tally up your online search presence is regularly updated content that they can show to visitors based on the newest trending searches. So if you simply write an article that helps people discover some of your most recent products and services or helps people with a trending question that’s relevant to your products or services you can refer more traffic from search engines to your business online that will help increase your sales.

Search Engine Optimization Maximizes All Sales!

A referral system done right can even create a viral marketing loop via Word of mouth sales because of person after person refering more than one other person to a useful coupon or rebate. Sometimes quality products will convince each new customer to sell to five more customers. This is a good example of viral referral marketing where one sale leads to a total of six sales leads to 26 sales times five times five times five for each new customer to the point you might sell out of all your products just from one good referral campaign using this digital marketing tactic that also existed before these online tools, it just a lot easier now for people to use their cell phones to access the internet so that’s where the referrals are coming from.

When I worked at the yellow pages back in 2012 the president was retiring and they weren’t doing so well, but they were at least beginning to get into the habit of adopting SEO and new digital marketing strategies into their business. They’re still using my filler ads that I designed 8 years ago! By now they must have printed hundreds of billions of copies, but honestly the yellow pages are not your best bet if you want to create a successful sales campaign for your business.

SEO Effects All Business Sales (Local & Online)

The primary objective of this article is to give business owners a better understanding of why SEO is essential as a core focus for anyone looking to increase their Word of mouth sales.

As you can see I could go on and on about different ways SEO is a useful strategy to increase Word of mouth sales. In other articles I’ll demonstrate individual use cases for various SEO practices that are guaranteed to boost the word of mouth visitors to your business if done correctly.

I’ll go into more detail about successful strategies for a sure fire search engine optimization campaign with individual tools, tips and tactics in various other free articles you’ll find throughout web design leader as well as exclusive tools and resources in our paid membership section for businesses, webmasters, and SEO specialists looking to up their game and increase sales for their business.

I hope you all enjoyed this article and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Abe Lab,
Your Web Design Leader