In the fast pace digital world, most marketers have many different strategies that will improve their website presence and visibility on the internet. Many of them will utilize blogging as a main strategy to achieve this goal. However, Blogging alone will not guarantee that it will have an impact in bringing in traffic.
SEO deals with many other different factors than just creating content via blogs. To come up with a solid SEO strategy involves blogging, website optimization, backlink building and many others. Most businesses do not understand how SEO works and what should be done. That is where SEO Agencies come in, as they can come up with a solid strategy for your business.
What Is SEO?
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. What this is for is ranking your website on the search engine so that it can generate traffic via keyword searches.
So there are many search engines in the market that deal with SEO. Google being the more well known one. People will usually mention that they want to be ranked on Google.
Factors of SEO
For building a reliable and solid SEO strategy, it basically involves searching and publishing. For search related factors, a search query will determine the search result. Google will consider the location, social networks and the device that you are using. So it is basically fairly simple for Google to know what keywords you are searching for.
As a business owner or marketer however, it is much more complex. Because the main goal is to improve the visibility on the Google Search Rankings. As there are over 200 different variables in the Google algorithm, you will need to deal with all these moving parts. Most of time, you won’t be able to, but there are certain factors which you can look into while trying to climb the rankings.
- Quality of Article
- Click Through Rate
- Bounce Rate
Importance of SEO
Why is it important? This will be fairly simple, as it will mainly help generate more traffic towards your website and therefore increase the awareness of your brand. Whether you are selling a product, providing a service or just want to inform the people about your cause. Once everything has come together, you will generate more leads, leading to conversion which means more revenue for your business.
In certain cases, we will see that some products or services will generate a lot of traffic. So in their thoughts, SEO might not be important for them. Of course this is a good start for any business. But this does not mean that you wont need to work on your SEO strategy.
Most cases, there is a chance that the traffic being generated are not of a high quality that can bring you conversions. This means that the keywords that you want aren’t properly ranked and as such visitors coming to your site wont be converted.
If you put in a proper SEO strategy in place instead, you will have high-intent specific keywords that can attract the right customers to your site which you will then be able to easily convert.
On-Page VS Off-Page
The simplest way to explain about the 2 difference between these are that for on-page are efforts being done within your own website. For off-page instead, it is being done outside your website. Most SEO agencies will often recommend that you include both of this methods into building your SEO strategy.
The strategy would be to focus on on-page and building it at the start so that the website will have a strong foundation and high quality ranking. Once you are comfortable with the amount of traffic via your website, you can then opt to include an off-page SEO strategy.
Optimizing Website for Rankings on Google
With all the strategies and plans in place. It is also important to look at your website to see whether it can handle and manage all the strategies that you want to execute.
1. Keyword Research
At the very beginning, you will want to identify what keyword you should target in order to have high quality traffic to your website.
Using Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find out and plan which keyword will be most beneficial for your business. There are 2 different types of keywords that a lot of people search on. Some are general and some more specific. They are both called short-tail and long-tail keywords. Based on the chart below you may see the difference between the 2.
2. High Quality Content
As there are many articles or contents being published on a daily basis. You will have very high competition within your industry in terms of publishing content. Of course, you will always want to create content that is better than your competitors.
The best way to create a high quality content is to focus on talking about a keyword that you want to target. Your content will need to include all the materials about said keyword or topic. You will also sometimes need to go beyond that in order to stand out from the crowd. Here is just a simple guideline to follow on how to create your content.
- What to include in your content
- Tone and style of your content
- The general format of your content
3. Optimizing On-Page
Once you have created an article that has the right message you want your visitors to read. The next step is to make sure that this article can be seen on the internet by optimizing your On-page strategies.
- Short and Simple URL to the article
- Title Tag containing the main keyword
- H2 Tags used for structuring your article
- Meta Description for people to have a short into of the article
- Internal links so that people can access certain pages via keywords within the article
4. Website Backend
The website as a whole plays a very important part of any SEO strategy. Optimizing the backend of your website is important as you want people visiting your article to also be able to easily access other links and part of your website.
As a rule, you will want main links and secondary links for easier linking of pages. Finally it has to also be mobile friendly as a high percentage of the internet usage are on mobile devices.
5. Building Backlinks
Most people will not understand what backlinks are. A simple explanation would be have links in other websites link to your website. This means that when that website has visitors that are viewing their content. They will also be able come over to your website via the backlinks.
For this both quality and quantity are important. You will want as many backlinks from these higher quality sites.
6. Tracking and Analytics
For any business, there is always trial and error. So in order to find out whether your SEO strategy is working for your business, you will need to know the statistics of your strategy. With this you can track your key metrics and refine your plan accordingly.
As long as you stick with your overall strategy, you will be able to tailor and adapt to the changes of the current market and consumer behaviors. Here are some of the list of SEO key Metrics that you can keep track of.
- Organic Traffic
- Bounce Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Click Through Rate
- Pages Indexed
- Pages Crawled per day
- Crawl Error
- Exit Pages
- Your Ranked Keywords
As SEO strategies goes, this is just a simple guideline for people who are considering putting their brand or business out into the internet. For a more comprehensive guide, there are many beginners guide to SEO out there which can help you further understand Search Engine Optimization as a marketing tool. If you do not wish to further burden yourself with this knowledge, there are also many SEO consultants that can provide you with the strategy that you need. Pricing for SEO services are also usually similar across the board which we will also further discuss on our next topic.