SEO has been around since the 1990s and has quickly established itself as one of the most important methods to gaining a strong online presence and improving your business’s online visibility. However, with several hundred ranking factors and thousands of articles all proclaiming to be the most important SEO rules every website owner must follow, choosing which SEO techniques to implement can seem like an overwhelming task. While all of them are important in their own right, there are really only a handful of golden core rules that really make or break an SEO strategy, so it’s important to keep them in mind when optimizing your business’s online presence.
1. Local SEO
Boosting your online presence, in general, is important and a good SEO technique will ensure that. However, as the experts from an SEO Sydney Company point out, the reason why you want your business to have a strong online presence is so you can gain more customers, which is where local SEO comes into play. Local SEO, in essence, enables you to reach out to your local customer base by appearing on Google Maps and the first page of search results more often. When people are searching for what you provide, they’ll see your business’s website associated with your local area more often. People often search for businesses near them. While it’s true that a lot of people will look online first for what they need, a lot of them will do so to browse their options, before committing to one business and going there in person. Local SEO symbolically, and quite literally, puts you on the map and makes it easy for people to find and connect with your business.
2. Intuitive Web Design
You’re likely to have seen websites that are both aesthetically pleasing and very easy to navigate. That’s because while many people use the Internet for entertainment, it’s also used as a very effective tool by businesses to help them make sales or sign up new customers. Crawlers look for more than just the keywords you’re using when ranking your website. They also measure how fast your website loads, and how easy it is to navigate. In essence, a user-friendly website makes it more likely that your business will be visited by people who are actively searching for what you offer because they’ll be able to find it easily. For example, it should be responsive enough to work optimally no matter what device is being used to browse it, as well as for voice search. When you design your business’s website, don’t cut corners by settling for an amateurish site that has no aesthetic appeal or is difficult to use. This will reflect poorly on your brand, and instead of making a sale or gaining a new customer, you’re more likely to turn them away from your business. It can also negatively affect your SEO efforts.
3. Know Your Audience
A lot of people are guilty of making the mistake of designing their business’s website and creating a digital marketing strategy without first identifying who they’re trying to target. It sounds like simple advice, but failing to identify your target audience can make a huge difference and lead to your business having an online presence that doesn’t reflect its main objectives and is more likely to lose traffic as a result. Without knowing who your target audience is, you’re not going to create the right kind of content. The content that will be relevant for a younger demographic is unlikely to appeal to an older one and vice versa. In addition, failing to identify your audience means your business isn’t going to have a clear idea of what its online objectives should be.
4. Quality Content
By now, you’ve probably realized that SEO and content go hand-in-hand. It’s no secret that high-quality content is what attracts people to a website and gets them coming back for more. Without good, interesting content your business will be dead in the water because it won’t attract repeat visitors or build up any kind of reputation as an expert in its field. A business’s website has to be informative and engaging if it’s going to attract visitors. If you’re offering news, you’ll need to keep up with current events so that your content is always relevant. If your content provides an alternate perspective on existing issues relevant to your business, people will value it and be more likely to share it with their friends.
5. Social Media And SEO
There’s a reason why businesses will pay big bucks for advertisements during events like the Super Bowl, and that’s because the channels used by the media companies during such major televised events are well-established and can’t easily be replicated or bypassed when trying to reach a large market of people. Social media is no different, and depending on the kind of business you run, your social media presence can be invaluable when it comes to SEO. For example, if you’re running a local business that targets customers in a specific area, social media will help you identify any problems or issues with your service and give you the chance to resolve them as quickly as possible. This ensures that your customers will be happy and continue doing business with you, and having happy customers is like gold when it comes to SEO because if people enjoy using your service or buying from your business, they’re more likely to return and recommend it to others.
6. Performance Analysis
Tracking your SEO progress is an important part of maintaining a successful strategy. Without knowing how you’re doing, it’s impossible to figure out what went wrong if your rankings drop for certain keywords, or why they’ve dropped in the first place. If you find that certain keywords are no longer bringing traffic after several weeks of being on top of Google, optimize them or take them out entirely. That said, you can’t expect instant results from any marketing strategy, SEO included. It takes around 6 months to really start seeing results, so it’s important to set realistic goals and expectations for that period in order to tweak things where necessary while avoiding jumping through completely different strategies too soon. That could impact your marketing negatively since none of the things you’re using will have a chance to deliver the right results.
SEO is complex and ever-changing, so it’s important to ensure that you keep track of changes in the industry and stay up to date with the latest news and trends. By identifying your target market, ensuring that your content is high quality, using social media to engage with potential customers, and using performance analysis to identify what works best for your business, you can establish a strong online presence that keeps people coming back for more.
