SEO and its Importance
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website ranking in search engines search like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. So the website can get more traffic on it.
According to research by Digital Synopsis, the first page of the search result gets approximately 95 percent traffic on it. This means that only 5 percent of people visit even the second page, much less the third page or so.
So it does not matter how well designed your website is, if it is not visible to your valuable customers then it is good for nothing. Hence, SEO plays a very crucial role in lifting your website ranking and bringing more customers to your doorstep.
10 Important SEO Strategies
1. Utilizing Accurate Keywords
One of the most important factors in SEO is investigating the correct keywords. By correct keywords, we mean words or phrases your valuable customers might use to find you or your products or services.
Predicting the right keywords and using them in your website, URL, content, or product description would greatly affect your page ranking in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It is a time taking process but very fruitful and worth doing it right.
Fortunately, there are many keyword planning tools available online. Some of the most popular ones are Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and KWFinder.
2. Upload High-Quality Content
Customers don’t only need to just look for your products or services. They might have a lot of queries related to your products or services. Providing relevant, informative, and meaningful content to your audience can help you a lot in SEO.
Providing high-quality content that includes targeted keywords can lure people into staying on your website. Besides boosting search engine optimization, it would also help you build your brand, interact with prospective customers, and also provides an opportunity to create internal and external links.
Do not forget that our ultimate goal is to provide informative content to our audience. Stuffing your website with irrelevant keywords could harm their reading experience. And make sure to provide regular content for your audience.
3. Utilize Social Media
Besides searching for your business on search engines, people also search it on social media platforms. So having your online presence on social media platforms can also help you bring traffic to your website.
You should also share the same content on different social media platforms which you are providing on your website. And at the end of it, you could provide your website URL for the social media audience to visit. This way you can boost your SEO by directing regular traffic to your website.
4. Build Internal and External Linking Structures
Building up credibility and authority for your website, as a small business, could consume a lot of your time. But there is a path that can lead to building a high level of authority from Google’s perspective that in turn will improve your website ranking. And the path is to get internal and external links to your site. Links are one of the most important indicators for Google to decide if your website is worth visiting or not.
An internal link can be defined as the hyperlink between two pages of the same domain or website. By connecting your content through links, you can create a hierarchy for your pages.
You’ll be guiding Google and your audience to your most important pages because they have more links than the others. It will also increase the average time your audience is spending on your website. So using the correct strategy for internal linking can enhance your SEO by a great margin.
External link a.k.a. backlinks is also a type of hyperlink but in this case, your page is being approached from another domain or website. According to the state counter, it is considered to be among the top 3 website ranking factors and confirmed by Google in 2016.
You would get more boost in your SEO if your website or page is getting backlinks from a highly ranked website that has high Domain Authority. According to a survey by ahrefs blog, the major reason websites don’t get organic traffic from Google is not having backlinks.
5. Improve Local SEO
Optimization of your local business’ online presence is carried out by local SEO strategies. So if you want to attract more local customers to your website, then it is crucial for you to effectively utilize local SEO.
And one of the major tools in the local SEO arsenal is Google My Business, a free platform to list your business on Google. Some other important parts of local SEO are having up-to-date social media pages which can link back to your website.
6. Improve Technical SEO
Technical SEO deals with optimizing the technical structure of your website to make the crawling, indexing, and ranking process easy for the search engines. It makes sure that your website has a responsive design, up-to-date encryption and security, fast loading speed, and mobile optimization. Some of the major strategies for technical SEO are explained below.
- Submit your website sitemap to Google through Google Search
- Acquire SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) for your website and make it secure. Learn how to do so.
- Remove old and outdated content from your website
- Google’s algorithm prefers if you send highly ranked outbound links instead of old and broken
- By utilizing the SEO audit tool, make sure that your site does not have any duplicate content
- Improve your site’s load time by compressing large images and files, browser caching, eliminating unused scripts & files, and other
7. Improve On-Page SEO
On-page SEO a.k.a. on-site SEO deals with the process of optimizing webpage content which could assist search engine bots during crawling and indexing. Even though we have created valuable and informative content for our audience, it would all be for nothing if not being optimized. Some of the most important on-page SEO strategies are explained below.
- Using the keywords in the first 100 to 150 words can be very beneficial
- Put relevant keywords in your meta tag. These are the tags shown only in the source
- Use keywords in the URLs and keep them precise
- Use relevant keywords for the main heading and it should be wrapped in an H1
- Try to make the meta tag and H1 tag catchy
- Distribute your content into different sections. And use strong keywords in the sub-headings of those sections, and wrap them up in H2
According to a survey by databox, 36 percent of SEO strategies experts say that the most important element in SEO is the headline or tag of any content.
8. Make Video Content
Almost one-third of people’s time is being spent watching videos on the internet (Depositphotos). Nowadays everybody makes video content for their product marketing since it entertainingly conveys information.
Sharing your video content on social media and ad campaigns could bring more traffic to your website. YouTube gets 1 billion watch hours every day. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your video’s title and meta description. It can help the search engines while they perform crawling and indexing.
9. Enhance your Website for Mobile Phones
Mobile phone usage is being increasing rapidly over the past few years. According to research by CNBC, approximately 73 percent of internet access would come from mobile phones by 2025. So making a mobile-friendly version of your website is very crucial for SEO strategies.
Your website should have a responsive and convenient design to get automatically adjusted with the resolution, orientation, and screen size of every mobile phone. It would benefit your mobile website visibility since search engines rank mobile website versions differently from desktop ones.
10. Use Google Analytics
After implementing all the important SEO strategies, now comes the point of conducting an audit to evaluate your website. It highlights the areas where your SEO strategies need modification for even better visibility and ranking.
It is a very easy process and can be accomplished by many effective tools such as Google Analytics, SERP Simulator, Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, and many more. But unfortunately, many small businesses neglect this crucial strategy and could never bring their website ranking to its maximum potential.
Conclusion
As a small business owner, it is very important for you to be aware of SEO strategies. So that you can bring more traffic to your website, and can make more sales by doing so. But even after implementing all the important strategies, you should be patient because optimizing your website ranking is a time taking process.
So without wasting any more time, start working hard on these strategies to make your future customers find you.