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Search engine optimization (SEO) affects the visibility of your website online. Good SEO means more page traffic and higher chances of selling your products and services to a wider audience. No matter how good your products are or how well designed your website is, without an SEO strategy your chances of ranking on Google or any other search engine are slim.
How important is SEO?
Sure, you already make other marketing efforts to drive your audience to your website. You spend on advertising and maybe you work with content creators to post links to your page. But that is not enough.
If you get traffic from other sources, that’s great! But did you know that organic search is worth five times more than google ads? It is like that because more than 90% of website traffic comes from search engines.
Users who land on your page from a search engine are more likely to convert because they specifically searched for your brand, products or services. On the other hand, someone who landed on your page after coming across your ad may not have planned to visit your website in advance.
Unlike organic search, that’s intentional, but paid marketing efforts can distort someone’s experience. Besides, any website that is too deep in the Google search page can lose its credibility.
Related: 7 reasons why SEO is important for any startup
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy improves your website’s search engine rankings to improve your organic traffic. A complete SEO strategy should address three types of SEO:
- On-page SEO: Targets the content on your website and makes sure it matches your specific search query. Some critical factors that affect on-site SEO are the quality and uniqueness of the content.
- Off page SEO: Focuses on strategies outside of your website to improve credibility and ranking. Link building is the backbone of off-page SEO strategies.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO deals with the backend aspects of your website to help improve your ranking. Good technical SEO means your page load time is fast, all your pages are working, and there’s structured data.
Related: This is what makes SEO important for any business
Simple SEO strategies to improve your ranking:
1. Content is everything
While Google has made significant changes to its algorithm over the past year, content has long been a priority. Consistent publishing of compelling content is the most important factor influencing your ranking. This means that your website not only needs to have a ton of keywords, but you also need to produce high-quality content that is unique and adds value to your readers.
Google looks at the quality of your text – beyond any SEO technique. You need to go beyond ordinary calls to action and stand out from other similar pages.
If you have an e-commerce business, creating a blog to complement your main page can answer your audience’s questions and help you rank higher in search engines.
One of the factors Google looks at is whether your content is up to date. Updating your website with new content with a blog will be much easier. In addition, a blog can help you reach a wider range of searches and increase average visit time.
There has been debate about the ideal length of a blog, but according to one HubSpot study as of 2021, the ideal blog post length for SEO should be 2,100-2,400 words.
2. Make a keyword list
Keywords are no longer the essence of an SEO strategy, but they are still essential in optimizing your page. Use a keyword search to help you find a list of keywords related to your niche.
If you are a new business, it would be a good idea to target keywords with low competition for a higher chance of ranking, and getting more organic traffic to your website would be a good idea. Of course, these keywords should make sense for the type of content on your page.
3. Know what your audience is looking for
Many will make the mistake of creating content to increase page rank – this technique will backfire. In the end, you will have a page full of keywords that are not relevant to your business. Consider creating an accurate buyer persona to understand what your target audience wants. After that, you’ll know what motivates your audience and what content can meet their needs.
4. Build high-quality links
A backlink is when another website links to yours. It is one of the most important factors that influence your ranking and is a great way to get organic page views. This means you can’t score with on-page efforts alone.
Top websites can get backlinks organically and building connections with reputable websites is essential. One of the best ways to get backlinks is to send a genuine outreach email to websites you have linked to.
Email blasts do work, but are becoming less effective as many marketers have overused them. That said, there are plenty of resources on the internet to get your creative juices flowing and develop creative ideas for building an outreach campaign. If you’re running an outreach campaign, make sure you’re polite, sincere, and always try to provide value first.
5. Don’t upload large files to your page
Images and videos undoubtedly add value to your content and can help drive more traffic to your page. However, these files can be large and therefore affect the loading time of your page.
Page load time is one of the factors that affect your page’s ranking, and it also affects your mobile-friendliness. Look at these factors and what managers can do to keep up with them.
Many plugins and tools can help you reduce your file size without losing quality. Never upload high-resolution images. As a best practice, stay within 500KB.
Related: 10 essential SEO strategies for entrepreneurs to increase their traffic
Sum up
As with any business strategy, it takes time to see results. And instead of aiming for the stars, always make your SEO goals more specific to meet your business needs. This way it will be easier to track and measure your progress.
Since the algorithm is constantly changing, you should also keep up to date with the latest changes to ensure you are familiar with best practices.
