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Pretty much everyone uses a search engine, most of us daily, to look something up online. In fact, about 8.5 BILLION people use Google every day for searches. Whether researching the best snowshoes, looking for someone to fix your toilet, or a good place to go grab a burger, search engines are the common starting point when we need information. For business owners, search engines are a valuable opportunity to direct traffic to your website. That IS the point of having a website, right, to get your business in front of people who need your services or products?!
So this is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. For your website to have a snowball's chance of coming up in someone's search, your site must be optimized in such a way that a search engine will recognize your business as a good answer to what they are looking for. In other words, your website has been ranked by the search engine as relevant and useful to a particular search query.
When people are looking for goods and services online, if your business comes up in the search, you will increase sales.
People use search engines to check out a business. If the business is coming up in natural search for relevant keywords, it legitimizes a business and builds consumer confidence.
Having a website that competes well in search engines brings more demand for the business and that can result in better profit margins.
Improving SEO on your website leads to a better user experience because you are providing what people are searching for, addressing their needs and answering questions. As a result, they will come back and your site traffic will increase (which leads to higher SEO ranking by the way).
SEO is the art of optimizing your website to have a higher ranking with search engines so they will offer up your website as the answer to search queries.
Ok, so what can you do to improve your SEO ranking? Luckily, there are a lot of things that can be done to improve a website's search ranking!
When we are referring to SEO, we are talking about "Natural Search" or "Organic SEO" not "Ads". Anyone can pay enough (Ads) to have their listing come up at the top of a keyword search, but only websites that are the most relevant and have the most "page rank" to a particular keyword can get to the top of natural search.
Natural SEO is the objective because it has WAY better conversion rates statistically. While doing it the organic way may take more time, in the long run it's MUCH less expensive. Since anyone can pay for ads to get ranking, natural SEO drastically increases a business' credibility.
Search engines use computer programs called bots or spiders to "Index" pages on a website. Bots crawl websites for all relevant information, and then store the content in a database. The more relevant content (and some other factors that search engines index on websites) your site has, the more it is indexed, and, consequently, higher ranked. Better ranked sites come up earlier in search results.
While SEO can get pretty technical, we're going to stop there. We offer other resources if you want to get into it deeper and learn more.
We want to give you an overview of what a basic SEO strategy to improve your website's ranking online might look like. As experts, all this and more goes into our SEO services, but there are parts of these components that you can definitely do yourself. It's also good to understand what you are paying for should you invest in paid SEO services.
A keyword in digital marketing refers to a word or a group of words (keyword phrase) that someone will use in an online search. The first step in an SEO strategy is to determine the keywords that both fit your business, and what ones internet users are using to search for businesses in your industry.
As part of SEO strategy, keywords are very important and should be the core of all copy written for a website, as well as other digital marketing platforms. One of the major contributing factors to effective SEO is using the right keywords on your website.
Once you have your keywords picked out, they need to be present in titles, headings, navigation, meta tags, images, and other SEO elements on your website.
The other significant influencer on SEO is the content on your website. Search engines LOVE content - that's what their bots are searching for. It's the information on your site that will get you ranked in searches. First, you need to have enough copy and content on your website, and then be sure to be adding content regularly. Neither people nor search engine bots will have a reason to pay attention to your website if your content isn't updated on a regular basis. Regularly adding new content provides an opportunity to reinforce your keywords, service topics, and gives search engines renewed reason to pay attention to your website.
Linking between websites drives traffic and builds credibility (SEO authority). Link building refers to the effort to add links on your website sending visitors to other websites for information (outbound links), and particularly to links coming into your website referring your resources to someone coming from another website (inbound links). Be sure to ask your business colleagues to share your website or blog article in the resources on their website, that creates inbound links for you.
The more you get your brand out in front of people, the more they will search for you online. Make sure you are ALWAYS including your website in all your marketing and advertising. Also add content to your website that answers FAQs or provides other valuable information so you can send people to your website as a valuable resource when they come to you with questions. Always be thinking about how you can drive traffic to your site. The more traffic, the better your SEO will become.
We hope this article has shown that if you'd like your website to actually come up when folks search for what you do - you need to be doing some level of SEO efforts! If you'd prefer to put your energy into running your business, doing what you do best, let us take care of your SEO for you. We offer full SEO services and marketing packages to meet your individual digital marketing goals.
Get in touch with us to discuss how we can help your business move ahead of your competition with search engine optimization and search marketing services.
Noelle has been a marketing professional, and a published author and copywriter for over 20 years. Her work has been featured in both print publications and online media, where she has written on a broad range of topics. She owns Castle Media Co., assisting businesses with their marketing and digital media needs, specializing in website development, content marketing, social media, copywriting, and blogging.
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