Aviation SEO – How Important is Search Engine Optimization?

Why do you spend so much time on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

In every nearly every Office Hour with clients, we spend several minutes going over SEO results and changes. And we provide printed reports each month to our clients because we feel that SEO is SO important. 

There are many marketing tasks that our clients would rather spend their time (and money!) on than SEO – they’d rather talk about paid ads, social media, and other, faster forms of marketing. SEO is a long game, and it takes a lot of patience. 

Search engine marketing is harder to talk about and harder to quantify for two reasons:

1) It can get technical, and

2) There is often a delay between performance of SEO tasks and a visible or measurable result.

We insist on good optimization, sometimes over the protests of our clients, for one main reason.

For most businesses today, SEO is the highest ROI marketing effort. The benefits it provides exceed the value of other marketing approaches – direct mailing, broadcast advertising, online ads, etc.

Jayson DeMers – How Much Should You Pay for SEO Services?  Search Engine Watch

We disagree with Jayson – printed newsletters and a few direct mail campaigns have had equal or better return on investment for us than  SEO; although it’s hard to isolate costs since in the aviation industry people may find us through Google, receive a postcard, and finally respond to us when they see an email, as an example.  It’s difficult for us (and probably even for them) to say exactly which message prompted them to take action when they did.

In any case, being found on Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines when prospective customers are looking for your particular product or service today is what having a great ad in a printed industry or local directory was ten years ago.

Most aviation decisions would be considered B2B (Business to Business)

• 78% of B2B buyers start their research on search engines
• 50% of B2B buyers turn to social media/peer reviews
• 78% of B2B buyers go directly to vendors’ websites

The Data Behind How B2B Buyers Make Purchase Decisions

We will talk about what we do to optimize a site in a moment, but most importantly to most of our customers is the results they can expect.

Aviation SEO Results

One way that people judge an SEO company is by how well their own site performs against its competitors.  After all, if they tell you that search engine optimization is important and want to perform it for  aviation websites, you should see that they “practice what they preach!”

This table shows ABCI compared with our known competitors in aviation marketing. We also included a couple of our client sites for comparison, as well.

• You can see that we have a higher authority score and  SEMRush rank (these are both aggregate measurements by Google and SEMRush. 
• We have a higher amount of “organic” traffic, which means people who find us using the internet without clicking on paid or sponsored ads.
• Our site is optimized for 794 keywords, which gives us a nice diversity of business.
• We also have a high number of backlinks and referring domains.  This is important because the search engines look at the number of other sites with links to ours as a measure of the quality of our content. 

So, how do we achieve these results?

We start by selecting appropriate keywords (sometimes more accurately called keyphrases.)

How do we know which keywords to use?  We base our keyword selection on three criteria.

1. Relevance
2. Popularity
3. Competition.

Relevance can only be decided by humans, not by software. This is why we work with clients to prioritize our lists of keywords based on their experience of what words customers are likely to use. Years of experience working with customers can’t be replaced by any mechanical function, so our clients are left with the task of poring over spreadsheets once or twice a year.

Popularity and competition are only slightly less vital. It does very little good to optimize for keywords that are extremely relevant but that nobody uses.   As an example, “aviation copywriting” is an accurate (and very relevant) description one of the most important services we offer, but because few people in this industry are familiar with the term “copywriting” we generalize to “aviation marketing.” Sometimes a small difference in a keyword can make a big difference in results.

Here are the details of SEO tasks ABCI performs, based on your selected service level.

.Need more help?  Download our free  Aviation SEO Tip Sheet, or get a free consultation about our SEO Services for Aviation Websites.

More Aviation SEO Resources

• Common SEO Mistakes
• SEO Methods that Work
• Free SEO Audit for Aviation Websites
• Digital Marketing Glossary (Includes many SEO terms!)
• Done-For-You Aviation SEO Service