Here is why your business needs SEO and how to get started with an SEO strategy.
The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the number and quality of visitors to your website, which means you want more people clicking through to your pages from search engines like Google or Bing. SEO can be broken down into two categories: on-site optimization and off-site optimization. Both play an important role in improving traffic to your website.
There are many reasons why SEO is important for business owners. The first reason is because it can help you attract potential customers. Second, it can help you increase your revenue. A good SEO campaign can bring in hundreds or even thousands of visitors per month. Third, it can help you keep up with your competitors and beat them at their own game. SEO is an ongoing process, so you’ll always need to do some work to maintain your ranking.
Let’s talk about these aspects of SEO below.
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What is SEO?
SEO is an important part of any business’ digital marketing plan. The goal of SEO is to increase visibility of your website or page within a search engine’s “natural”, “organic”, or unpaid search results. There are many aspects to SEO, including making sure your site loads quickly, ensuring it’s mobile friendly, and using relevant keywords throughout your content.
Which search results are “organic”?
The big three search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. These sites rank websites based on relevance and authority. Your site’s presence in organic research results is not paid advertisements; they’re simply links to pages where people are looking for information. The higher your page ranks, the more likely it will appear at the top of search results.
According to Ahrefs, a popular SEO tool, 90.63% of pages are invisible in Google. This means that only 9.37% of all webpages are visible in Google. This percentage is low, so any business needs to make efforts to get into this golden 10% to get visibility in organic searches, which translates into visits.
Paid search – the ads above the organic search results – gets as low as 6% of the clicks for a keyword. The paid listings are higher and get more clicks, but they are more expensive as you pay for each click.
Why is SEO important?
If you want to rank high in Google searches, then SEO is essential. It’s not just about getting traffic from Google; it’s about getting traffic from all major search engines, like Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. Without SEO, you won’t see any traffic at all.
Why is SEO important for your business?
There are many reasons why SEO is so vital for businesses. Let’s keep them short:
- If people don’t find you, they will never come back.
- If people do find your business’ products and services through relevant searching, they may stay longer on your site than if they had found you by chance.
- If people leave without buying anything, you lose money.
- If people buy from you, they become brand advocates who tell others about you.
- Finally, you can earn money from advertising on your site.
SEO is important for any business, whether it’s an online store or a local service company. In fact, it’s one of the most important things you can do for your business. If you want to grow your company, you should invest in SEO.
SEO doesn’t require you to pay for ad space on Google or Bing. There are many other different ways to optimize your website for search engines. The best way to determine which strategy will work best for your site is by testing them out. You can start with a technical audit or you can tackle content marketing via a brand new blog. There are different angles you can start with in the SEO world.
Not sold on the idea to use SEO techniques on your site to promote your business? No problem, let’s expand on the reasons why it’s important.
SEO increases traffic to your site
If you’re using Google Ads, this will cost you, say, $5 per click. Bringing 1,000 visitors to the site will cost you $5,000. By investing the same amount in content creation you may get more visitors. The only caveat is that the traffic buildup from organic search takes longer. Paid is immediate, SEO is slow.
SEO helps growth brand awareness
Relevant content that resonates with your audience helps your business grow its authority with the target audience. As your site becomes a solid and trustworthy resource, this contributes to the growth of awareness about your business.
SEO boosts your site’s credibility
SEO optimizations have one main purpose: to drive traffic to your site. This is achieved through the creation of high quality content that helps people solve problems and answer questions.
SEO contributes to more audience targeting
If you want to rank high in Google search results, you need to optimize your website’s content for relevance. To achieve this, you need to ensure that your content is interesting, engaging, and easy to understand for your main audiences.
Why SEO for Business Should Be a Priority?
A well optimized website will rank higher than one that isn’t. This means that if you’re looking for new clients, your site needs to be visible to search engines. Let’s see how this can be achieved.
On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO
There are three main components to any successful SEO campaign:
- On-Page – This includes everything from the content itself to the way it is structured. It also covers things like meta tags, page titles, and page content.
- Off-Page – This involves getting links back to your website, including social media sites, blogs, forums, directories, guest posts.
- Technical – This involves the page load time on your website’s pages, server response times, hosting, etc.
These three components need to play well together for optimal results.
Quality Content is King
High-quality content (articles, landing pages, blog posts, well-optimized collection pages, and product pages) remain one of the most important pivots of well-optimized sites.
Your content should be unique and interesting enough to encourage readers to want to come back to read it again. It should include relevant keywords and links to pages where they can find out more information.
Good content helps build backlinks to the site. Links to your site remain important signals for search engines to understand that your content is appealing. The best way to generate quality backlinks is by creating engaging content that people will share. This means writing blog posts, guest posting on other websites, and using social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Producing videos, sharing e-books, white papers, blueprints also falls under content marketing.
Here are some important tactics that count for good SEO on your business site.
Start with Basic Keyword Research
Don’t target specific keywords, but topic clusters.
The first step in this process is to find out which keywords people are using to search for information related to your business. This will give you an idea of what terms they are searching for, and whether those terms are broad or specific. Once you know which terms people are using, you can start researching them further.
Understand Intent Expressed in Keywords
It’s important to understand the intent behind a keyword before you start researching it deeply. For example, if someone searches for “best workout app,” then they may not necessarily want to read articles about workout equipment. Instead, they might just want to download an app that helps manage their workout routines. In this case, a different set of keywords would be more appropriate.
Prioritize Keywords
The best way to figure out which keywords to include in your content is by using Google Search Console. This tool will show what keywords your site is already ranking for.
Then use Google Analytics. This tool will show you what people are searching for on your site, so you can determine which topics are most relevant to your audience. You can also use these other paid and free tools for more precise and expansive keyword research and site rankings.
Content Production
With the keyword research in hand, get started with content creation. You can now get into the world of content marketing. This is the process of creating and distributing high-quality, valuable information for free. This could be in the form of blog posts, videos, e-books, infographics, and so on.
Landing pages fall into this group of efforts that are meant to improve your site from the SEO perspective. A landing page is a webpage designed to entice visitors to take action. For example, if someone searches Google for “how to lose weight fast,” they will see a list of search results from various websites.
The first result may be a blog post from one of those sites, which has a link to its homepage. If someone clicks through this link, they will land on the site’s home page. This is called a “landing page.”
Custom landing pages allow you to target specific groups of people by using different types of content. For example, you could show a video to men and women separately. Or you could offer different prices depending on whether someone is new to your brand or already familiar with it.
B2B SEO vs B2C SEO
The main difference between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) SEO is the focus of your content creation. B2C is about selling products and services directly to consumers, whereas B2B focuses on selling products and/or services to businesses. For example, if you were planning to start a new clothing brand, you would focus on B2C SEO because it is easier to reach customers through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, than it would be to reach out to potential customers using B2B methods.
Here are some things to remember when you start with SEO for your busines.
Use Natural Language
A lot of people think they know what Google wants them to type into its search box, but that’s not always true. If you want to rank highly for certain keywords, you should use natural language instead of trying to force yourself to fit a keyword into your page’s title and body.
Mobile-friendly is Better Than Fancy Design
The mobile web has become a powerful tool for marketing and advertising. But it’s not just responsive design that makes websites mobile friendly—it’s also important to ensure that your site looks great on all screens from smartphones to tablets to desktops.
Question-Based Approach to Content Creation
If you want to generate leads and sales through your site, then content marketing is one of the most effective ways to do so. It allows you to provide valuable information to prospective customers without having to spend money on ads.
Question-based or FAQ-type of content can be useful to provide details about your products and services. This approach is also useful to answer general questions and provide solutions to users’ issues.
Easy-to-find Content
If your website has lots of content but it’s difficult to find what you’re looking for, this may frustrate your site’s visitors too. More to that! It also drives them away. There’s nothing worse than spending hours trying to find something on a site that isn’t user-friendly. Make sure your site’s structure is easy to navigate and visitors can find what they need quickly. See, for example, how to structure your site’s categories and tags.
If visitors can find the needed content easily, most probably search engines will find the content as easily. This is a contributing factor to better rankings in organic search.
Secure Website
The best way to ensure your site is secure is to follow industry standards and recommendations. That means using HTTPS whenever you can, which allows users to see that you’ve verified the identity of the server they’re communicating with. It also means implementing security measures like two-factor authentication so that if someone does gain access to your site, they won’t be able to log in without being prompted for additional information.
Link Acquisition
Paid backlinks may put your site in bad with search engines as link trading is a frowned-upon technique per search engines. If you’re looking to build links organically, it’s important to consider where those links will come from. For example, if you run a blog but want to link to another website, it might not make sense to include a link back to your own site. Instead, look at what content would benefit both sites and find a way to share that content across domains.
Create More Extensive Content
It’s not enough to post one blog article per day. If you want to build a successful business online, you’ll need a strategy to produce more than one piece of content every week.
Summary
As a conclusion, your business can benefit from SEO efforts on your site. SEO campaigns will bring your business more visibility through better rankings in search engines like Google. At the same time, SEO is a process that starts with keyword research, analysis of keyword intent, and content creation at scale. SEO also looks after technical excellence and good performance of your website. It also includes constant efforts to promote your site externally.
Need more details about how we can help optimize your site for better organic results? Send a note and get a quick free SEO audit.