How to take Your brand to the next level.

SEO at Every Turn

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This important online process has almost become the be-all-and-end of all business growth strategies. To get an in-depth understanding of how we reached this stage and how SEO came to be, we have detailed the timeline of this practice in our article, Search Engine Optimization: A History.

However, even if you have read all the literature out there, you may still be asking yourself, what is the fuss all about? Give us 5 minutes of your time and let us convince you why your business needs to apply SEO techniques.

A Multi-Layered Approach for Better Results

If you’ve just created a new website for your business, it is unlikely to show up in the top search results positions without putting in the effort. So, if ranking well on Google is essential to increase credibility and drive leads to your business, what should you do to get there? The key lays in optimizing your website for search engines. As a business, you care about leveraging the practice of SEO to get relevant traffic, inquiries, and sales. At the end of the day, you aim to increase revenue and profit.

Why Should You Care About SEO?

People search for services, products, and things they need online. So when you get traffic on your website from such keyword searches, this is specific, high-intent traffic. And that translates into having commercial intent – the willingness to buy what you are offering.

Depending on which industry your business belongs to, that highly qualitative audience is either niche or wide. That audience is going to search for other things as well which can be more or less loosely related to your business. That’s where you can create new opportunities to be informative, and trusted by your potential customers. As a result, you are expanding your capture net and your sales.

A Complex Algorithm

It’s not an understatement to say that Google’s algorithm is complex. To determine the ranking, it looks for:

• High-quality, relevant information
• Relevance – which is identified with reading the website’s content
• Links – the more trusted the sites you link to, the better
• Bounce rate and click-through-rate
• Site loading speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Thick versus thin content

There are hundreds of ranking factors, and Google’s algorithm is continuously being updated and becoming more selective.

Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website

Keyword Research and Targeting Tips

The first step is to identify the keywords your target audience is looking for.  There is some groundwork to do here to stay relevant:

• Search Volume – Consider how many people are searching for a given keyword. The more people, the bigger the audience you will reach.
• Relevance – The popularity of a term does not mean that it is relevant to your prospects. Make sure it fits well with what your audience wants.
• Competition – Asses the cost versus the expected return.

Our tip: If you have a functioning site, you probably already have some kind of traffic. So, you assess your existing keyword data and understand which ones are bringing in the most traffic.

On-Page Optimization

Once you have your keyword list, the next step is to effectively implant them into your site’s content. You should target one main term on every page and add a list of related terms.

Title Tags

Aggressive and manipulative use of keywords is being more and more detected and penalized by Google. Therefore, you want to make sure that your content is clean and your keywords are included in your title tag.

Meta Descriptions

The meta description is another part that is updated in the site’s code but not seen on the public part. Basically, it is your site’s additional advertising copy. While Google’s algorithm may not always show the meta description, it does increase your chances to attract traffic if the copy is enticing.

• Thick & Unique Content: Word count is very relative to each site. You won’t be penalized for having a smaller word count on your pages. However, recent Google updates will play favorites with long, interesting, and unique content.
• Engagement: Google is increasingly taking into consideration social engagement and user experience metrics. You know that you have a good grip on this if your content speaks to the needs of your target audience and actually responds to their search queries.
• Shareability: It is important to have content that people want to read, engage with, and also share with their community. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect that every piece of content is shared and goes viral. Stick to content recommendations and you will not need to worry about how many shares you got.

Alt Attributes

The way you mark your images will affect the way search engines read – find – your site. In addition to that, image descriptions will also have an impact on traffic generated from image searches. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if a user can’t view it. Sometimes, the images you insert on your website can break: files can get deleted and users will have issues loading these photos. Therefore, you always want to make sure you include a clear description that can give insight into what the file is. Doing this will enable search engines to better understand what your page is about. Just write naturally about your subject to avoid sounding aggressive or stuffing keywords together in a way that does not make sense.

Our Tip: Do not try to trick Google into crawling your site or ranking it higher by adding a multitude of key terms

URL Structure

Your URL structure is important for tracking, for shareability, and your online advertising campaigns. It helps segment data, traffic, and activities in your reports. It is often advised to use short, descriptive URLs that are easier to remember. This does not imply that you should insert as many keywords in your link as possible. It will not sound natural and it may look aggressive.

Our tip: Unless you have to, and can implement a proper redirect link, we don’t recommend you change your URL.

Information Architecture and Links

Information architecture refers to how you organize the pages on your website. The way that you organize your website content and include relevant links between your pages can impact how your site fares on search queries. Links are votes of confidence and a way to understand what your page is about, its importance to user searches, and credibility.

Your copywriting is just as important, and using proper anchor text – which is a descriptive sentence that carries the link – is what Google will be looking for and assessing. Once again, do not cram words that don’t make up a natural sentence together.

The choice of the link is just as crucial in this since having external links to sites that have longstanding credibility is an indication that your site is showcasing important information.

Our Tip: Linking strategically to key sections on your site from your home page is very important to direct visitors where you want them.

Plan and Create Content

The most effective way to always be on top of your content update is to prepare a plan and stick to it. You can draft a monthly or weekly calendar which will include not only the frequency of blogs but also the topics – or pillars – you will focus on. The choice of topics is strategic and must be aligned with your overall SEO approach. It’s always a good idea to write organic, natural copy and optimize it for search engines as you go along. Make sure that you hit the marks for SEO and the readability of your text. Doing so will increase your shareability, the value of your assets, and benefit your visitors.

Our Tip: Find the best channels and campaigns to spread the word about your new content. Let people know about your resources and where to find them. Using trackable links, you can then analyze traffic and better plan your outreach every time.

Page Speed

Fast loading sites mean happy visitors. Naturally, search engines place a certain weight on site loading speed. If your site visitors have a good initial impression, they are more likely to visit again and spend more time browsing your pages. Eventually, site speed affects conversion rates. So Google created some tools to help you measure that metric.

Mobile Friendliness

Being mobile-friendly is one of the most important things in today’s on-the-go lifestyle. Your audience wants to, not only, be able to find you when they use their mobile device, but also – and most importantly – be able to view and interact with your site in a fast and qualitative way. Having said that, search engines take into consideration a plethora of parameters when deciding how valuable your site is on mobile search. Moreover, you must keep in mind that most of your traffic will likely come from mobile search.

Redirects

Improperly executing redirects on your site can be nefarious for your search results rank. Whenever you can avoid it, you want to refrain from moving your site’s content from one URL to another. In other words: if your content is on example.com/page, and that page is getting search engine traffic, you want to avoid moving all of the content to example.com/different-url/newpage.html. Unless there is a strong reason that affects your business and strategy, you should steer away from this practice.

Duplicate Content

With regards to content generation, you already know that the best kind is the thick, juicy text that really offers value to your visitors. So, how can you go wrong? Often, to gain time, writers tend to generate thin, short, and truly uninspired content. Of course, it is understandable. But there is a truth in the saying that quality is better than quantity. And the same goes for Google. Thin and duplicated content (that is using the same or nearly identical text on multiple pages) is not tolerated. Doing this will reduce your chances to rank competitively for phrases against sites that have consolidated their links and content game. Large portions of repeated content will also make your brand look cheap and not rate well with visitors, therefore also influencing your lead generation. This cycle will end up having an impact on your revenue.

Our Tip: Stay true to your brand and don’t work on your copy with Google ranking in mind. Instead, focus on providing value and quality to your potential customers.

Keyword Rankings

The rank your website is getting is not your final objective. There is a lot of personalization involved which will vary across locations, and make tracking difficult. The rank will be a good indicator of your site’s health. However, you must not get overly stressed about it and forget that your ultimate goal is to get traffic and more business. SEO is a strategy that may help increase your turnover.

Setting Goals & Tracking

The best and most straightforward way to measure your search engine optimization effectiveness is by getting new leads, and increased sales. Using a tool such as Google Analytics, you can have detailed reports on organic traffic and, you can set goals on your landing pages. These goals will measure specific activity happening, and give you clear insights into conversions. Analytics help you track visitors’ clicks, engagement, and interest in your website content.

 Atypical approaches

For some businesses, utilizing SEO is more specific and requires a unique strategy. Such atypical specific types of search environments include:

• International SEO – Adjustments to reach good site ranking in different countries and different languages are very important to reach customers in international markets.
• Local SEO – For smaller businesses and franchisees, getting local rankings for different variations of your location. It is really the most valuable organic search traffic available.
• App Store Search Engines – If you have a mobile application, aimed at interacting with your clients or as a main business offering, having your app show up in searches on various app stores can be extremely valuable.

Key Takeaways

We think that the facts and figures make a very compelling case about the importance of SEO. It is no longer an option to digitize businesses and their services. Even if this digitization is exclusively informative, it is still an asset to a brand’s credibility and lead generation approach. In this context, it is almost contradictory and surely counterproductive to invest in a well-developed website and disregard SEO processes.

When performed correctly, an efficient digital strategy that includes the clever use of SEO techniques will yield results that translate tangibly. In addition to this, SEO is something you can control. While there are some aspects of your business that you may not have any power over, this is one thing you can entirely use to navigate your market presence.

Another thing to keep in mind about SEO is that it does not end once you become successful. If anything, that is when you will update your overall strategy and refine your activities.

So, the commotion about the greatness of SEO is not overrated. You need it because in the reformed technical and digital age we live in, your business needs to adapt to the latest selling techniques, and be present where the customers are. At the risk of being pulled to the sidelines, business continuity can be secured through the evolution of your presence in the market.