Marketing for Language Service Providers
Part Two: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In this edition of Marketing for Language Service Providers, I’ll be discussing the second half of getting your online marketing started.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of creating pages that are relevant to a searchable key phrase. Well written pages will not only help your Google Ad quality score (discussed in last week’s blog), posts with great keyword density will help you appear in the organic results below those ranked ad spots. For every search someone makes of that keyword, or key phrase, (for example, “ASL Interpretation in Austin, TX”) your language services company can appear as a paid search result (an ad) and an organic search result.
Google Ads + SEO
Getting started with content on your site is simple. Hire a freelance writer or write pages yourself, but focus on matching every Google Ad keyword to a corresponding, unique page on your site (Don’t double up – one page should address “Cleveland interpretation services”, one page should answer “Cleveland Spanish interpretation services”). 500 words with either your key phrase or keyword mentioned at least three times is a great goal.
Your content should answer one of these questions: “Why am I the right place to purchase this service?” or “Why am I the best place to learn about these services?” If your content answers one of those questions, the post will benefit your Quality score and it will also establish you as an expert on the topic when a potential customer comes to the site.
Keep it simple so you don’t get overwhelmed. Make a list of five key phrases that fit what you do and will likely match a customer searching for you. Create five posts that match those key phrases. Online marketing is about making the road to your website easier for potential customers. Keywords are just the names on the signposts.
Posts versus pages
For SEO purposes, pages and posts do need to be treated a little differently. Pages are the static parts of your website that are usually linked in your ads and in your menu. For Boostlingo, these include information about features like our Video Remote Interpreting. What you’re reading now is a post.
Search engines treat the content on pages and posts exactly the same. However, using posts and pages correctly will help with user experience on your site. User experience does affect your quality ranking and therefore your ad cost. This article does a great job of explaining the different between page content and posts content, I suggest giving it a read before planning out the content you need to create.
A Quick Note on Websites:
Just like with your Google Ads campaign, for this part of marketing to work, you need a website.
For creating pages on your site simply, I recommend WordPress for two reasons. First, WordPress is used by businesses everywhere, meaning help for issues on your site is usually a Google search away. Second, you don’t need to be a computer genius to build a site from scratch using WordPress. As a small business, you can use premade, free templates and mainly focus on blog content.
Even if you do not use WordPress, I recommend choosing a web hosting platform that you won’t need a developer to customize. Customizing a website is a huge investment of money most small language service providers won’t need until they’ve built a much larger customer base. Especially if you are using a scheduling platform like Boostlingo’s, your website does not need to operate your business, it just needs to help potential customers learn about you and get in contact.
Learn for the long haul
Most language service providers are small shops where the owner/operator wears every hat. If you’re one of these interpretation outfits, it can feel like there’s too much to learn and too much to do. I’ve made online marketing the first two sections for Language Service Providers for a reason: they matter most to getting your business started online.
Language service providers differ from retail and other service industries because they are mostly business to business transactions. What this means for your language service company’s online marketing plan is that social media, video and other expensive marketing investments are further down the list of potential marketing tools.
These flashier efforts require a full team and a big budget to get leads. They are also generally a business-to-consumer rather than business-to-business marketing tool. By the time you get to the point where you need to deploy social media and video to remain competitive, you won’t have to learn everything you need to know to produce that type of content – you’ll have people on staff who handle those details.
