Summer is fast approaching and many people are planning great activities. Maybe you want to look for cheap flight tickets to a tropical paradise? Or book tickets to that trendy new amusement park that opened? Whatever you’re searching for, the most used website to look these things up is Google.
As a frequently used search engine, many businesses nowadays rely on Google for consistent traffic toward their website and brand. The easiest way for people to discover your business is by having a strong digital presence and putting into practice a good SEO strategy. The term stands for search engine optimization and while it may sound complicated, the concept behind it is pretty straightforward.
At 360 Business Marketing, we’re a digital marketing agency with a focus on a website redesign, SEO planning, and content marketing, among other services. Contact us today if you want to kickstart your digital marketing plans for the summer and enhance your business’ SEO. Here are a few things you should consider about SEO and what you can do to improve it.
Understanding SEO
In its most basic function, search engine optimization (SEO) helps someone find your product or service on Google, which can then lead to them finding your website. The goal of SEO is to expand your business’ digital presence in organic search results from search engines. These efforts help drive more users to your brand, helping to increase the chances of added conversions and revenue.
SEO is all about optimizing your current web site’s content, conducting keyword research, and inputting inbound links (or hyperlinks) to increase that content’s ranking and your business’ overall visibility. This results in SERPs, or search engine results page, that serves as responses to a user’s query. Your webpage is then crawled and indexed by the search engine, before showing up as one of the first results to pop up in a typical search. SEO is not a quick endeavour, however, as it can take months to fully materialize.
SEO takes into account your website’s rankings and visibility. There are a few ways to improve these things for various site pages of your website such as improving your structure and design and evaluating external, off-site factors. Search engines will often favour features such as good title tags, keywords, image tags, inbound links, and internal link structure.
Overall, understanding SEO is all about helping position your business throughout the entire buying journey of the user. It can ensure your marketing strategy matches any new buying behaviour from a potential lead.
Creating A Good SEO Strategy
Speaking of strategies, a good SEO strategy is one that requires patience, plenty of hard work, and attention to detail for the smaller things. Every search engine will crawl your website to follow links, land on a page, and use those links to find other content to evaluate. As part of your strategy, set the navigation and links as text-only functions if you can.
For your website, cut down on lengthy words with complex paragraph structures. That also goes for your blog content and URLs. To enhance your SEO, set them up to be as minimal as possible and optimize the page around the main keyword to get the best results. Search engines like Google use the time it takes for someone to read your page as a strong indicator of quality. If possible, you should also size your images appropriately to make sure it doesn’t take up space.
You should also remove or update any dead links for nonexistent pages for your website. You want to avoid providing people with a poor user experience that prevents search engines from indexing your content. Take some time to also remove any duplicate pages because they are irrelevant to your website.
Measuring & Tracking SEO Results
Measuring the results of your SEO strategy involves tracking important data about traffic, engagement, and links on your website. The technical setup of your business is integral to ensuring your website is visible in any search results and monitoring your efforts can help you improve your strategy further.
Some of the metrics you should analyze should include organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, conversions from organic traffic, average bounce rate, top landing pages, the total number of indexed pages, and the growth of your internal links.
Once you’ve gone over your data and created a good SEO strategy, it’s time to put your plans into practice.
Implementing Good SEO Practices
One last piece of advice for SEO we’d like to give you involves implementing local SEO. This means SEO that uses results with local intent and specific to a relevant location. The purpose is to concentrate specific information to users that help them find the things they need close to them. This particular practice primarily targets smartphone users or those using mobile devices to find your product or service. Most SEO plans take into account local SEO because search engines assess your business’ location and contact information.
Avoid “black hat” practices that manipulate search engine algorithms by keyword stuffing, hiding keywords in secret coding, and buying links from untrustworthy websites. If a search engine like Google catches on to this, it could result in your page being completely removed from search listings.
Work with 360 Business Marketing today to improve your company’s SEO for the upcoming summer season. Contact us now to learn more about SEO and how we can refine your digital marketing efforts in 2022.