You are well established locally, but you wish to expand your reach and grow your business, You appreciate the value of boosting your SEO campaign, but you have no idea where to start. The cost factor may also be weighing on your mind. You needn’t worry because we’ll walk you through the process of improving your page ranking, without breaking into a sweat. Read on to zoom your business to a higher plane and move decisively ahead of the competition.
Be Clear About What You’re Offering a Customer
Are you crystal clear about what your product does for a customer? Think carefully because the answer will tell you how you’re going to handle SEO. Ask yourself these critical questions, and you’re halfway home to nailing the problem:
- When does your product enter a customer’s life? Is it when they’re in the home, in the office, on their mobile phones, or when they’re traveling?
- Does your product address a deep-seated desire like how to have a great time or how to get good food?
- Is the product connected to disruptive events in the home (like cleaning up a mess) or some personal issue (sorting a financial problem)?
Think from the customer’s angle and picture how he’ll expect you to respond to his need. You’ll get a fair idea regarding the keywords that’ll pitch your product.
Hot Tip: Try the weekly videos on Whiteboard Friday; they’re free and a great way for beginners to learn SEO strategies.
Probe Deeper and Sort out Technical Hitches
The website is like a car; it might look great from the customer’s point of view, but how good is the engine beneath the bonnet? Technical issues reduce the customer traffic coming to you and lower your page ranking. If you want to make it easy for search engine bots and crawlers to find you, categorize your product so that search engines index you correctly and people know you exist.
Digital marketing experts at MiroMind believe that enterprises ought to become digitally-competitive to engage consumers that are digitally-driven. They have shared best practices to help enterprises grow their business and generate leads:
- Ensure that your site loads a lot faster than 4 seconds: Customers skip sites that load sluggishly.
- Avoid duplicating or plagiarizing content: You’ll place search engines in a dilemma as to which URL to choose in similar search results.
- Avoid dead or broken links: You don’t want to deprive customers of the information they’re seeking.
- Review your ‘canonical link elements’: In plain English, this means you tweak your URL to make it stand out among other websites. This is important because you’d be competing with sites that may show similar content.
- Optimize your page for SEO: For search engines to find you, you need better headings, precise meta tags, and unique content optimized with keywords that customers actually use in searches.
Hot Tip: Use the free Google Search Console tools to improve page visibility; SEMRush will help you locate the right keyword suiting your needs.
Be Serious About on-Site Optimization
By optimizing the site you’re aiming to do two things. You’re preparing the website to figure prominently in search results, and you’re gearing up to receive a higher flow of visitors to view your product. To do this, the content needs to be of higher quality, unique and non-plagiarized. The keywords must blend in naturally so you don’t create a spammy effect. Titles should be thought-provoking and eye-catching. The meta descriptions (how you summarize your product) should be clear and focused. Keep your language tuned to the locality.
Hot Tip: SpyFu is a neat tool that’ll help you take a closer look at your industry, and will help you identify great keywords to attract visitor traffic.
Let Google My Business Tell People Who You Are, Where You Are, What You’re Doing
If you Google map your locality and your firm don’t show up on the street corner, you’re losing a great business opportunity. Without wasting time, claim your spot on Google My Business and verify it. Categorize your business correctly. Post pics, videos, writeups; the sky’s the limit. Anticipate customer queries, and post answers online so customers in your locality find you faster. Post neat FAQs that will harvest customer eyeballs.
Hot Tip: There’s a simple guide to Google’s Q&As prepared by Mike Blumenthal that businesses will find thought-provoking.
Keep One Eye on the Competition: The Other on the Road Ahead
You may or may not know the competition in your locality, but in the online world, Google’s top five search results are your real threats. Analyze these guys keeping critical factors in mind:
- Why are they ranking higher than you even after using the same keywords? Are their keywords that you’ve missed out?
- How is the site designed, and how are pages getting indexed?
- What is your assessment of the quality of the sites linking to your competitors? How relevant are the linked sites to what the competition is pitching?
- How fast do the top sites load? Pagespeed tools will help you find answers.
Hot Tip: Nothing could be easier than to have a backlink analyzer sitting in your browser. It’s free so you can use Majestic SEO to your heart’s content.
Exploit Schema Markups to the Hilt
Let’s assume you’re a hotel with events scheduled on the horizon, and you want to get the message across to an audience beyond your locality. You’d use a Schema markup – it’s nothing but a code telling search engines what you want them to show in the search result. You can easily convey who you are, where you’re located, what’s your contact number, and what time you are open. More importantly, you can load favorable reviews.
Hot Tip: You don’t create a schema markup and leave it there. You try combinations, test them, and see which ones hit the right button. That’s easy when you use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool which will help you view and assess the impact of your markup.
Getting Reviewed Is the Fastest Way of Building Links and Generating Traffic
People spend a lot of time pouring through reviews. They want to be sure they’re not missing out important features in the products they choose. Reviews drive traffic to your site. So get the industry big guns to pitch in with product reviews. Get someone influential to do a podcast or arrange a webinar so you (and your product) stay in the limelight. Invite guest bloggers to write on important trends, making sure you’re projected as the trendsetter. Give satisfied customers the space to air their views and personal experiences.
Hot Tip: Keeping track of what directories are saying about you can become a headache. Yext is the tool to use. It ensures that your business is mentioned in all major web directories, and the information syncs with your real-time business data.
Content Isn’t Everything: Images and Videos Count Too
People, no doubt, read a lot and your content must be optimized to attract the right crowd. But marketing geniuses will tell you to pay close attention to the benefits of visualizing content. It seems we humans are genetically wired to respond faster to visual cues. Use high-quality high-resolution images that are unique and correctly optimized to your readable content. If you want to be sure, perform a reverse image search on Google and check if competitors are using similar images.
Hot Tip: Your best reservoir of images is none other than Google Images which allows you to check copyright and access images that can be freely reused. CTRLQ is an image hosting tool that can help you archive and check your pics.
Conclusion
Businesses need to prioritize SEO optimization to boost search page ranking. Whether you’re a healthcare provider, a travel blog, or a financial advisory service, you can use what we have ideated to empower your SEO campaign. Make the most of these suggestions that are culled from the collective wisdom of the web’s finest SEO strategists, and move your business to the next higher level.