If you’re like most business owners, you may be wondering if SEO is worth your time and effort. You might also be curious if your business is doing everything it can to optimize its website for search engines. The answer, of course, is yes, and you can be doing more. SEO can help your business reach new heights by improving your website’s visibility to potential customers.
But before you can reap the benefits of SEO, you need to start implementing these practices into your marketing strategy. Here are some tips to get you started.
Start Backlinking
One of the best things that you could do for your business is to begin building links. If you are not familiar with what this means, it basically means to have other sites have a link that takes readers back to your site. You might ask why backlinks are so important; because the correlation between the quantity and quality of backlinks on sites and their position in rankings is undeniable. This is why you should have a backlink strategy, research every site you intend on leaving a link on, and continuously monitor growth to see which sort of links work best for your business. Bear in mind that this doesn’t mean that you should just begin leaving links on every site you find. The higher the ranking of the site the link is on, the better it is for you, so only choose great sites to leave links on.
Use the Best Keywords
The next thing that you are going to want to do is use the best keywords, which is going to require some research on your part. While it’s great to be producing content, that isn’t helpful if its without direction, so understanding what your customers or audience is searching for is key to growth. This basically means that you should keep an eye out for trending keywords within your niche to know what customers are looking for.
There are two ways you can do keyword research. The first is simple; open Google and begin typing a phrase, and see what Google’s autocomplete feature suggests. This feature uses the most searched phrases. The next is to go into more detail and use a keyword research tool to find out exactly how many searches a word or phrase receives.
Make Sure Your Content is Great
Publish high-quality content on a consistent basis. This will not only help improve your website’s ranking in search engines, but it will also keep visitors coming back for more. It’s important to note that high-quality content is only as worth as much relevancy it has, which is why you should apply your above mentioned keyword research before producing content.
More than keeping customers coming back for more, great content (meaning informative and entertaining), will establish your company as an authority within the niche. This is great because the next time a customer wants to buy something, they will think of your business first.
Local SEO
Many businesses are always very excited to begin search engine optimization, and begin targeting the massive international market. The mistake that these businesses make is forgetting about local business, which can be profitable if you optimize local SEO. Aside from that, when first starting a business, focusing on your local community can be much easier than trying to target an international audience.
One of the best ways to do this is by setting up a Google My Business profile, and then making sure every detail is correct. You should have the time your store opens and closes, what kind of products you sell, a few photos to increase attractiveness, a link to your website, contact numbers or email addresses, and more.
Improve Technical Aspects
One of the best ways that you can begin increasing traffic to your site, and potentially increase profits is by increasing the technical aspects of your site. A great way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of a customer and go through the process that they would.
By doing this you might find that your site is a bit slow, which is causing customers to just leave. You might also realize that the user interface is clunky and unintuitive, causing customers frustration. You might even see that the descriptions of some products are incorrect, or that they don’t include enough information.
Scrutinize Analytics
Finally, doing all of the above is great, but it doesn’t help if you can’t see what exactly is bringing in customers, or what is driving customers away. It’s for this reason that you should scrutinize analytics.
Analytics are your greatest weapon in terms of implementing changes, and seeing what needs to be improved. There could be broken links that need fixing, there could also be pages on your site that never get visitors that could be removed. Your latest user interface improvement could be the reason customers aren’t staying, and more.
