SEO Today, Influence Tomorrow
Updated: Aug 13, 2021
The truth is I have never jumped on the SEO ship for small-medium B2B firms in their first year of business development. SEO is essential - AND when compared to the list of priorities to be done in your first year of business development efforts, SEO does not make a list. Focus, specificity, and follow through on the top 3 priorities mean making tough decisions.
When you're just setting out in your business development efforts, laying a solid foundation is mission-critical. Building the empire on that foundation is 2nd. SEO is 2nd.
This wee article is to highlight the enormous value of investing in SEO today, to yield influence tomorrow, assuming you have your foundation in place already.
Influence is about Being Sought Out
for your expertise, reputation or skill set.
Being Sought Out means:
1. Being Found
2. Being Credible
3. Being Visible
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Being Found
The Assistant Professor of Engineering, Newcastle University, Singapore, determines that engineers need to consider the value of a personal brand for their career prospects in this day and age. Knowing nothing about Personal Branding, she takes to Google and punches in 3 words.
"Personal Brand Covid"
She hits search.
Google returns her a list of results that contain Personal Brand Covid.
One of those entries that gets her interest more than the others is this one:
She selects the [GUIDE] Setting up your Personal Brand and reads the article.
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Being Credible
The [GUIDE] impresses her.
It reflects the answers and ideas she is looking for related to her graduating class of engineers. It's thorough, helpful and she already learned so much from that article. She feels confident that there is sufficient expertise here to be of value.
I received a call from Noori in Singapore asking me about my article - and presenting her idea to me. She has a class of graduating engineers who she feels would best serve by having a personal brand to support their career prospects. Would I deliver a workshop to the type of engineers on Personal Branding & Influence? I said yes. We worked out the details, and the workshop happened.
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Being Visible
Addresses one of the fundamentals in human behaviour; familiarity & certainty. Both are required in a new situation to give us humans a degree of comfort in trusting you.
If you're visible everywhere, unconsciously I know you already, I trust you to a degree on that subject matter. I am more inclined to say - yes, I'll go like, listen, follow, attend, and join that thing of yours.
Suppose I have never heard of you, and I have never seen you. I am immediately on my back foot, skeptical, and far less interested in giving you any of my time, energy, and attention. There is too much uncertainty for me.
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How exactly does SEO support my Influence?
Being Found: "Personal Brand Covid 19" is the search term Noori entered into her google search box that pulled my [GUIDE] into her search results.
Noori found me because her "Personal Brand Covid19" problem that went into google matched my solution that included an SEO tag "Personal Brand Covid19".
I had those keywords in my article title, and I tagged the images with those keywords, and I used that keyword in the article many times.
Being Credible: And that means producing quality content that gives your brand new guests the certainty, trust, and confidence they need to determine you have the expertise, skillset, and insight to resolve their query.
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SEO Your Personal Brand
Being Visible: SEO your website, articles, images at a minimum.
Use titles of your articles that contain the keywords people will be entering into Google to find you.
And that means producing quality content that gives your brand new guests the certainty, trust, and confidence they need.
To determine you have the expertise, skillset, and insight to resolve their query.
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