Pawas Gupta
Small businesses love search engine optimization. With the right SEO strategy in place, any business can easily compete in search results for exposure, traffic and sales.
Moreover, the return on investment from successful SEO campaigns is high, and cost per customer acquisition is low. No wonder why entrepreneurs and digital markers adore SEO.
Believe it or not, it all starts with your website
Its simple really. To make SEO work you need a powerful website. If you plan on getting a website designed and developed, or are considering a redesign, make sure the web agency understands SEO. Having an SEO specialist involved in web design will save you time and you will be sure the new website is built in accordance with search engine guidelines.
Powerful search friendly websites
- Speed is as important as design. Search engines and users, both like websites that load fast. A beautiful website that takes 9 seconds to load will never perform well in search results. Quality hosting, clean code and low page size is what you are looking for.
- Content drives SEO. Avoid duplicate content. Search engines hate websites with duplicate content. Hire a quality writer how understands SEO copy writing. Such writers can help you produce fresh and SEO friendly content that attracts visitors from search engines.
- Content management system helps. There are many free and powerful open source content management systems that are used to design and develop websites. I like WordPress. Its free and being open source, there is a huge community of developers making the CMS better with every update. Its a go to CMS for creating SEO friendly websites. With amazing SEO plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, your SEO managers will have to worry less about the technical aspects of SEO and can focus more on building website authority.
- Go Responsive. No pinching, no squeezing. Responsive websites are the best. They look great on all devices. Such websites adjust their layout according to the device screen size and give visitors an optimum browsing experience. With people aggressively using smartphones and tablets to search the web, getting a responsive website designed and developed is the way to go.
- Fresh websites get more out of search. Websites that publish fresh content regularly get more search traffic. Businesses that invest in quality content production get more traffic, exposure and conversions with search engine optimization.
Know your keywords
Keywords are key phrases customers use to search for products and services on search engines. Ask your SEO’s for a comprehensive keyword research.
Let them know if your business operates internationally, nationally, locally (one city) or multiple cities. This would help them in presenting you key phrases related to your business, competition on key phrases and their search volumes in your target markets.
After you keyword report is ready, find keywords with substantial search volumes that accurately describe the searchers intent to find, learn more, or buy your products and services. Start with creating rich in content webpages to target keywords.
Local, national, and international SEO, all require different kinds of optimization. You and the agency, both should be very clear what level of SEO is to be undertaken.
Forget traditional link building and embrace content marketing
Links are still the most influential factor search engines consider while ranking your site. However, there is a very thin line between bad and healthy links.
A few very good links can get you to page one from ten in no time, a few bad links can get a website penalized and de-indexed from Google. It’s not about the number of links anymore, it’s the quality of links that matters. Quality links from relevant sources work best.
Take on content marketing
The best way to build a high quality organic link profile is to forget link building and start using content marketing.
- Invest in quality content production.
- Publish content consistently on your blog.
- Contribute content to other related blogs, online magazines, industry journals, etc.
- Promote content on web and social.
As your content gets published, consumed, mentioned, and shared, you develop a quality link profile, drive awareness, and attract prospects to your website.
Be active on social
Social signals now impact rankings. Brands that are active on social, perform well in search. Create community of people likely to buy from you. Map customers on social and promote your business profile and content. Generate brand awareness, create engagement, and bring prospective customers closer to your business.
Your social strategy, with the right content and audience, will create engagement and exposure. These social signals will positively influence rankings.
This post is for entrepreneurs and marketers who intend to take the right steps and make SEO work for their businesses. Hope you found it useful. Have questions? Ask me below.
Good luck with SEO.
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