SEO Round Table Discussion – InstaOffice Unwind Session

On May 9th 2017, InstaOffice, in association with Growisto conducted an invite-only round table discussion on Search Engine Optimisation in our Coworking Centre at 100 Ft road, Bangalore where leading online businesses and upcoming startups from Bangalore came together and dived into the fundas of Google rankings.

The discussion was led by, Kiran Patil (Founder, Growisto), who has over 11 years of experience in SEO. They have helped clients like OyoRooms, RichFeel, Toppr, CoverFox, Bewakoof, NoBroker by providing SEO consultation and implementation. Kiran also owns a website www.organicfacts.net which gets 4 million monthly visits without any marketing spend.

While the event was completely packed with founders and marketing heads of various start- ups, Kiran Patil gave insights to the complete productivity strategy on how to approach your SEO. Right from should you focus on SEO, several strategic queries regarding how to set goals, which numbers should be tracked, team structure, which activities can be outsourced, which activities can be done in-house, etc., were answered. For those who missed the session, we have picked a couple of questions that surfaced during the round table discussion.

How do I develop a website?

The key is to build a website for your user. Building an attractive website isn’t enough to increase website visits; it has to be user friendly, easy to navigate and cater to the visitor’s needs so that the visitors return. A bad website consists of irrelevant content, which is not related to the product or business you are selling or providing. A website that doesn’t cater to answer your user’s’ needs when they are on your website is useless to them and they will move on to somebody else, who can provide them with the content they are looking for.

I have heard about primary and secondary keywords. What do I focus on, and why?

Target the primary keywords as the long term strategy. Primary keywords are the most significant ones (mostly one or two words) while optimizing a web page. They are mostly used on the important areas such as header, footer, inbound anchor text, H1 tags, meta tags etc. Primary keywords should be repeated up to a certain quantity of keyword density throughout the page. Choosing primary keywords that are most effective for you for conversion for your business is one of the most important activities in SEO. Focus on secondary keywords and local SEO for quick gains. Appropriate secondary keywords can increase your traffic significantly, however, do not stuff your page with lot of keywords. Also, it is easier to rank for the secondary keywords than for the primary keywords and ensuring that you include the secondary keywords or their intent gives you a chance of getting quick results. Local SEO is another area which you should focus on. Many companies, especially in India, have not optimized their websites for Local SEO and you can get a good position early if you foray into this.

Should B2B companies focus on SEO?

If the search volumes in your segment are reasonably high and if you are spending a good amount on Adwords, you should definitely focus on SEO. The gains from SEO are immense for companies that are targeting clients in other countries. However, if your target audience is not searching for your product /service on search engines, then you should not invest in SEO. Just make a SEO friendly website, do some basis keyword optimization and that is sufficient.

When should you build an in-house team for SEO?

If SEO is your main marketing strategy, you should definitely build an in-house team. Certain expertise driven one-time activities can be outsourced. However, if your SEO budget is relatively low, say 1-2 L per month with no in-house senior team member to manage your SEO activities, then outsourcing the entire activity is a good option.

Watch the whole event <<here>>. Happy watching!

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