If you are not on the first page of Google, you’re nowhere. This sure sounds scary but when done right, SEO doesn’t just attract visitors to your site—it brings in the ones who are most likely to become customers. In this guide, you’ll learn what SEO is, its excellent benefits to your business’s success, and how you can build an online presence by leveraging SEO. By the time you’re done reading this blog, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to optimize your brand’s presence.
What is SEO?
SEO, an abbreviation of search engine optimization, is doing everything you can to stay on the top of search result pages of Google and other search engines. In simple terms it means ensuring your website is optimized for search and optimized for conversion.
When a customer searches for your product or services, they should be able to find your website without you paying for it. But you don’t have to stop there. And when customers visit your site they should be inclined to purchase your product or services.
Do I really need SEO?
Yes, you do. Even companies like Apple and Nike need SEO Services to stay on top of the search results. But we completely understand why businesses have this question. SEO is not a one time task, it’s an ongoing task. Plus, it’s a tedious task that can take away a lot of your time. But here’s a harsh truth: if you’re not spending your time, efforts and resources to work on your website’s SEO, someone else is and they are getting all the business your website could have gotten.
Having a website without investing in SEO is like having a car without wheels. It’s not gonna take you anywhere. So, stop thinking of SEO as an expense and start thinking of it as an investment that is gonna pay you dividends for years to come. But like any other investment, SEO is risky. You’re gonna get returns on your investment only if you do it right. Otherwise, you might as well throw your money down the drain.
The benefits of investing in SEO
According to statistics, over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine. By implementing the right SEO strategies, you are increasing the chances of appearing on the coveted first page of the search engines. Imagine the visibility your brand’s gonna get if that happens. To convince your customers to buy from you, you’d first have to be in front of them when they are looking at you. And Search engine optimization helps you do exactly that.
Valuable traffic
Google search optimization not only helps you get traffic, it can help you find customers that are actively looking for your product or services. Getting the right traffic is a slippery slope but if you get it right, your website would see anywhere between a 2-5% conversion rate. By using the right keyword and phrases, you will be able to attract the right audience that is interested in what you have to sell.
Cost effective
Your business could definitely get an initial boost using paid advertising but SEO is what helps you sustain for a long time. By using paid methods to get visibility, you are spending money out of your pocket to get customers to buy from you. But SEO is an investment. You keep on doing it and there will be a day when your business won’t have to rely on paid ads to sustain.
The consequences of neglecting SEO
It may be hard to believe but there are businesses out there who choose not to invest in SEO. Here’s what gonna happen to them:
- Without Google optimization, their business is not going to rank on search engines. Each of their competitors are investing in SEO and they are not. So, their website will be buried deep into the search results where no one is going to find them.
- They will miss valuable opportunities to connect with customers who are looking to buy their products or services.
- Their brand is just going to be another brand X that no one knows about. Since no one is gonna find their website, no one’s gonna buy from them and so, no one’s gonna know about their brand either.
- Because these businesses don’t invest in SEO, they will have to resort to paid advertising. Eventually they will exhaust all their budget because of higher advertising costs and reduced profits.
- SEO gives brands a detailed insight into customer behavior. And brands that don’t invest in SEO wont get valuable data regarding customer behavior and search trends.
How to do SEO the right way?
There are several ways to nail your SEO strategy but a common rule of thumb is to make your website easy to find and after visitors arrive at your website, ensure that they stay, interact and buy from you. Below we’ve listed some techniques that will help you achieve that:
Find the right keywords
Everyone uses different combinations of words and phrases to find your brand. Some may resort to extremely short and generic search terms while others may type in a very specific query. What you need to do is ensure that you have all of those important words and phrases in your copy, backend or anywhere in your website.
To do this, you don’t always need very powerful and expensive tools. Sure, they do help but you can get almost the same results with many free Google keyword research tools out there. Along with using tools, you can also look at what keywords your competitors are targeting.
Contrary to the popular opinion, it is not recommended to add only high volume keywords to your copy. Your keyword list should be a perfect mix of high volume + medium volume + long tail keywords.
Keyword should be selected based on the following factors:
- How many people are searching for it
- How relevant is it to your target audience
- How difficult it is for you to rank on it
Here are our expert best practices to choose keywords:
- Use your root keyword in your page title, H1 and URL
- Use secondary, synonym and long tail keywords in your copy
- Don’t include misspellings anywhere. They’ll do more harm than good
- Religiously monitor keyword performance and adapt
Add content that informs customers about your brand and products/services
Content is another major ranking factor when it comes to SEO. In the last two decades, Google has made hundreds of changes in how their algorithm works. One thing that has not changed is the importance of high quality content. Content is what informs visitors about your brand and your products/services. If you neglect your website’s content, no amount of keywords is going to compensate for it.
Here are our expert best practices to write effective content:
- Only include useful information in your content and avoid the fluff
- Make it easy for visitors to respond by adding a clear call to action
- Use different types of content like blog posts, infographics, case studies. This gives you different ways to inform, educate and entertain the audience
- Use descriptive headings (H1, H2, etc.) with relevant keywords to structure your content
- Include internal links to relevant pages on your website to improve navigation
- Ensure your content is mobile-friendly and displays properly on various devices
Optimize meta tags and title tags
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of SEO optimization. Just like a well written copy tells your customers what a website is about, optimized meta descriptions and title tags tell search engines what your site is about. But they are not only essential for Google’s algorithm, they are one of the first things a visitor interacts with before coming into your site. Title and meta description both give visitors an insight into what they should be expecting once they click on the page.
Here are our expert best practices to optimize meta tags and title tags:
- Place most important keywords at the start of the sentence to send a loud and clear signal to Google
- Keep them focused and concise. About 150–160 characters are enough for conveying your product’s unique selling points while also adding your main keywords
- Add a subtle call to action to encourage customers to click on your link
- Keep on testing different variations to identify what works best for you
Improve your file name
Make sure your file names are optimized, not just your titles. Search engines also check the names of your pages and images. To do this right, focus on one thing for each page. For example, if you’re making a page about a product you are selling, your page name should be “church-candles.html” and the photo “church-candle.jpg”.
But keep it short. A name like “church-candle-that-burns-for-long-time.HTML” is too long. It hurts SEO, looks strange, and is hard to remember. And use hyphens, not underscores. They’re better for separating words in file names.
Focus on improving user experience
Keywords are what brings customers to your website but a great user experience is what makes them stay and explore. Simply put, UX (User Experience) means making your site easy to use and navigate. Many brands spend so much time and resources getting the keywords right, writing compelling copy and creating an attractive design but they forget to optimize basic things like page load speed, mobile responsiveness and formatting.
If your site has a high bounce rate, chances are that your site’s user experience needs work. A great user experience means your customers will spend more time on your site, interact with your product/service pages, sign up for your blog and download a guide.
Here are our expert best practices to improve your site’s user experience:
- Ensure fast loading times for your website’s pages to reduce bounce rates
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive
- Simplify navigation menus and site structure to make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for
- Make CTAs prominent and clearly indicate the action you want users to take
- Use legible fonts, appropriate font sizes, and ample white space to improve readability
- Incorporate images, videos, and infographics to break up text and make content more engaging
- Maintain consistent design elements, branding, and navigation throughout your website
Most brands fail to get SEO right because they are always looking for a magic solution that works fast. Let me break the bubble for you, there is no way you can rank your website in a few weeks. SEO demands two things: time and consistent efforts. You cannot add keywords once and hope everything works out. You’ll have to constantly remove keywords that don’t work and replace them with new keywords that might. You’ll constantly have to write blog posts to stay relevant. There are a dozen other things that need to be done before you’ll start seeing any results. Sounds like a lot? Well, TBH it is. That’s why most brands leave it to a Local SEO expert. You too can take the burden of SEO tasks off your shoulders and give them to SEO ranking experts at SIPRANSH ECOMMGROWTH.
