BY NOW, YOU’VE HEARD OF SEO, BUT WHAT IS THERE TO KNOW FOR RUNNING YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS?
What does all this mean and how does it impact your business?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzzword in marketing and entrepreneurship. Most people have heard the term, but not everyone knows what SEO does or how it’s important for driving new traffic to your online presence.
If you consider yourself a small business, an aspiring blogger, a micro-influencer, it’s important to speak the basic language of SEO and be able to implement the strategy on your site.
Can’t you just design your cute little website and call it a day? Unfortunately, no! Many business owners assume, “If I build the website, the traffic will automatically come.” but with such an incredible amount of content online, that’s simply not the case.
Organic search traffic is competitive, so it’s important to put the proper tactics in place to have the greatest chance of acquiring organic traffic, just like the ones you’ll find in this On-Page SEO Basics free PDF.
YOUR TARGET MARKET IS ALREADY SEARCHING FOR WHAT YOU HAVE TO OFFER
Statistics show that there are over 1 BILLION searches performed daily across all search engines. How do you make sure these searches are leading to your website? How do you ensure your target audience doesn’t all go to your competitors? The solution is SEO.
SEO, as jargon-y as it sounds, is just the process of increasing the amount of qualified website traffic you receive through various potential customers already taking to search engines to look for your product or service.
A search engine is any tool people use to enter a query and receive results – that includes Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many more although Google has the large majority of search market share with over 70{796a95fc5444f41812b9edaab99a866ec37db0529a00763c538745befe17ebdd}! How can you leverage SEO strategies for your website? Let’s break it down
In this article, we list 9 Basic, Yet Effective SEO Tips For Marketing Your Business for Beginners:
1. A MOBILE RESPONSIVE SITE IS CRUCIAL
Here’s the thing: more than half of the traffic on the Internet today is through smartphones and tablets. If your site is not mobile-responsive, which means that your site looks good no matter the device used – desktop, tablet, or smartphone – it will lead to a very bad user experience.
If you’ve ever had to pinch and pull a website on your smartphone to more clearly see words and buttons, you’ve experienced a site that is not mobile responsive.
Moreover, Google penalizes websites that are not mobile friendly because what it all comes down to is that Google’s goal to deliver the best experience to searchers in the least amount of time.
If you’re looking to rank high in search results, having a mobile-responsive website is an absolute must.
2. MEASURE ANALYTICS AND METRICS
How do you know which SEO tactics are actually bringing in traffic, and which ones need more improvement? Start tracking your data.
Google Analytics is a brilliant tool that can save and analyze all your data. It will track where the users on your website are coming from, how users interact on your site, what related interests they have, and where website traffic is dropping off.
For example, if you notice a page on your site has a particularly high drop off rate, you’ll be able to identify that that particular page needs more engaging content and/or perhaps an additional or better-placed call to action button to lead the user elsewhere on your site where you want them to go.
If you don’t tell users where to go, they’re more likely to click away. But remember, not everyone is ready to buy, so use data to learn to deliver the right message at the right time.
Using Google Analytics will help tremendously in making business decisions about where you should invest your resources, and where you need to switch up your SEO efforts.
3. WRITE LONGER POSTS
Longer content, in terms of SEO, is more likely to rank well because it can incorporate more keywords, and more thorough information for readers which is then more likely to answer the searcher’s search query.
Most SEO experts say that long-form content should ideally be longer than 2,000 words, and also consist of fresh, informative, high quality content.
The quality is of utmost importance because users look for unique and interesting content. The more they read and engage, the more Google understands that your site is of benefit and value to users.
You can check our another post : How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Grows Your Business
4. INTRODUCE FRESH CONTENT
As well as posting long-form content, it’s also important to make sure to post fresh and updated content. Google loves fresh content because searchers love new, fresh, and up to date content Not only is this content more relevant for your readers, it also lets Google know that your website is active.
It’s not always easy to keep generating new topics and content constantly. In fact, many clients I work with share with me that it’s one of the hardest parts about marketing a business. In addition to brand new content, also consider making use of your existing content.
One simple tip is to update your most popular posts. Simply add relevant, current, and updated information about that topic and re-publish the post. And don’t forget to re-publish with the current date!
One important note about this recommendation – don’t try to game the system. Republishing posts without significant, fresh, and informative content can be easily picked up by Google’s algorithm and get you penalized.
You can check our another post : How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Grows Your Business
5. LEVERAGE OPTIMIZED KEYWORDS
As a business owner or aspiring business owner, you’ve heard the terms “keyword” and “keyword phrases” over and over.
That’s because keywords and keyword phrases act as a bridge between what your audience is searching for and your content. The keywords you use must be relevant to your content’s topic so Google can index your website correctly.
There are a wide range of quality keyword tools online that can help you determine what your users are searching for. Here are five of my favorites that I integrate into my keyword research strategy:
- Moz
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google My Business (if you’re targeting a local audience and have built out your listing enough to gather data)
- Google Auto Suggest
6. OPTIMIZE URLs
Let’s consider two URLs for the same (fake) website:
www.yoursite.com/services
www.yoursite.com/382233/9e38202hqqa#loaddelay
The first example is far easier to make sense of and it tells what the content on the page is about.
It’s important to keep your URLs as simple and clean as possible. Google itself wants you to have readable, simple URLs to provide a logical URL structure.
This means that you should primarily use text in your URLs instead of numbers. More importantly, the URL should clearly describe what the content is about while being as short as possible.
You can also use the URL as a placeholder for your main keywords separating each word by a hyphen.
7. LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA
Having a warm social media presence Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even LinkedIn is one of the basics of promoting your website. While social media platforms offer great exposure for your business, they can also (indirectly) lead to more traffic on your website. Social signals have been thought by SEO experts to be one factor in ranking.
8. STRIVE FOR BACKLINKS
A backlink is simply when one website mentions another website by linking to it (I just linked Google here – but you get the point!). Backlinks are important because they suggest credibility.
If a site is willing to link to yours and direct its precious visitors to your site, it’s positive verification that content on your site is valuable. Since you have little control over who links to your site, Google finds backlinks to be one signal of credibility of a site.
It’s also important that these backlinks come from high quality websites that relate to your niche. It’s always preferred to link websites who have established themselves as reliable sources. The higher the domain ranking of the website you link, the more power its backlink holds.
9. WRITE FOR PEOPLE, NOT SEARCH ENGINES
Last but not least, it’s essential to spend a considerable amount of time researching the pains, needs, wants and challenges of your target market and buyer personas so you can deliver content they find valuable.
When you write content with the purpose of fulfilling your customers’ needs or answering their questions, your site is more likely to be recommended to an audience searching for answers you provide.
If you’re just getting started learning about SEO, keep up the great work. SEO is quickly becoming imperative for sites interested in driving qualified. organic search traffic.
Looking for more? Grab our free pdf about On-Page SEO Basics for Managing Content.
My goal in every post is to make the most of your precious time and pack these articles with insanely actionable content. Have I done that for you today? I’d love to hear your feedback. Contact me or comment below.
Here are some related article for you :
- How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy That Grows Your Business
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Your business matters. Now go do something awesome in the world.
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