Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has become a hugely lucrative business in recent years as the online marketplace becomes more and more competitive. For novices to the IT, tech and digital realm, SEO can appear to be a lot of jargon and technical wizardry that looks intimidating from the outside.
In this article we’ll attempt to demystify the foundations of SEO, and how it can help you make your website, products and services known in the saturated Google sphere. Practicing these basic tips and focusing on enforcing them a few times per week will soon see your rankings improve and your website climb closer to the coveted top spot of the search engines for your desired keywords.
Here’s our top 3 tips for what you need to start doing now to boost your website’s visibility.
- Keyword Research
The first thing to do is to think about your keywords. In an ideal world, what will your customers type into Google to find your website in the #1 position?
Be wary that some keywords are highly competitive and that focusing on them may not be the best idea for small websites. For instance, if you are a clothing ecommerce website, focusing on the keyword ‘red dress’ will be nearly impossible to rank for.
Keyword research tools like Semrush offer free trials so that you can begin to understand how likely and easy it will be to rank different keywords relating to your website or business. Another way to do this is to commission the help of a professional digital marketing and SEO company, with experts in the field who will conduct and implement this research for you.
- Content Is Key
Next, you need to understand the importance of quality content on your site. You should focus first on readability and then on SEO. In the past, people keyword-stuffed content so that it was virtually unreadable to people, to improve their ranking for that keyword. However, Google quickly caught onto this and severely penalized sites practicing stuffing.
Now, the key is to fill your site with new, original, up-to-date content that people love to read and to use your keywords precisely and sparingly. The more engaging your content,the longer people will stay on your site – which equals favorability in the eye of Google algorithms.
Keywords should be included in the following parts of your site: URL, headlines, subheads, and included in between 2-3% of the overall content of each page – calculators at the ready!
Don’t just stop at great copy. Including original multimedia content like video and infographics wins you major brownie points when it comes to rankings. Utilizing a ‘blog’ page on your site is imperative to keep adding new content to your site and to keep it looking active – try to add something new once per week.
- Viral Posts
If you can become a marketing expert and get your content going viral, then brilliant – that will drive heaps of traffic to your website and greatly increase its popularity. However, this isn’t easy to manufacture – you’ll need a great marketing team before you can stage excellent media stunts.
The next best thing to going viral is to do two things: get your social media presence tip-top and hire a marketing team. The latter point won’t be viable until your business and sales grow, but with great self-taught SEO, this could be sooner rather than later!
Set up social media pages for your site on all platforms, and ensure they’re kept up-to-date by posting on each once per day at least. Use it to engage with customers and provide excellent customer service. The more people talk about your site online, the better it’s viewed by Google.
Distribute new content across all your pages and promote a consistent brand identity throughout. You might soon find this is a full-time job in itself, at which point you could consider hiring a social media or digital marketing executive for your site.
Again, these are all factors that can be dealt with by a digital marketing company. Contact one today to see how they can help with all aspects of raising your site’s visibility.
