What is SEO?
As a marketing strategy that is in its infancy, search engine optimization still remains under the radar of many self storage operators. Some may have come across a poorly written, spam style solicitation email contracting of poor grammar, misspelled words, and empty promises of getting your business listed on the first page of Google search results for your targeted key terms. Unfortunately, many of these search engine marketers are tarnishing the reputation of SEO by doing this, and their marketing tactics can easily get your company's website blacklisted by the major search engines eg Google, Yahoo, MSN / Bing etc.
Luckily, there are storage marketing companies such as Storage Marketing Strategies that are strictly against this type of storage marketing, using only "white-hat" strategies that typically optimize your website to be seen by search engines as a quality site with high domain authority, ranking highly for the search terms associated with your website. This assures that your business will be among the first search results when a prospective tenant searches for self storage in your county.
A study performed in 2008 by Jupiter Research revealed that 68% of all seekers select a search result on the first page (first 10 results). By implementing a specialized self storage SEO plan, your company website will have the chance to reach the first page on the SERP's (search engine results pages) for many key terms relating to self storage in your area, allowing you to reap the benefits of increased website traffic and online visibility. If you are not already on the first page of Google, you are missing out on reaching that 68% of users. The difference between having a page 1 or page 2 ranking on the SERP's can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars of revenue for a self storage company.
To put search engine marketing in other terms, consider a self storage business in San Diego. The business's main competition is other self storage companies in San Diego, and when someone wants to find a self storage unit in San Diego, that is exactly what they are going to search for. So when a potential client brings up their favorite search engine and searches for "San Diego storage", would not it be great for that business if they were on the first page of millions of search results? This is exactly what SEO can do for your self storage company; giving you significant online visibility and extending your reach, therefore increasing your list of tenants and facility occupancy percentages.
