Anyone who aims to be successful online needs a strategy in place for search engine optimization (SEO). Without devoting time and effort to this, you’ll see low site traffic, and you’ll fail to secure subscribers, sales, or whatever you’re after. SEO likely seems complicated at first glance, and it is. Still, there are some steps you can take on your own to get things started and help your team learn and grow. If you need to hire help later on, so be it, but these are some things you can focus on to see immediate improvements.
Keyword Research
Mastering keywords is the first step of any successful SEO campaign. You need to understand what words and phrases your target audience searches for when they’re trying to solve a problem. You can then apply these keywords to your business to draw their attention.
Coming up with an initial set of keywords shouldn’t be too difficult. Put yourself in a customer’s position, and think about what terms they would search to find your site. What questions would they ask? If you were running an online supplement shop, for example, you might use some keywords like this.
- Shop supplements online
- Vitamins
- Weight loss
- Nutrition
Once you have some basic keywords in mind, you can start expanding into more specific areas. There are several tools online that can help with this, such as Google Keyword Planner. To make the most out of the data you get, you’ll need to start a Google Ads campaign, but that shouldn’t be a problem since it’s a good idea in general.
Site Optimization
With modern website builders, creating a website is simpler than ever, but that’s just the first step. You need to optimize your site for your audience and figure out ways to boost traffic as much as possible. For starters, you absolutely need to make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices. Mobile devices account for nearly half of all web traffic, so you have to cater to these users. Make sure your site loads quickly on these devices and has an easy to navigate display, or you’ll be losing a huge percentage of your market.
You’ll also need to optimize your site for search. This essentially means creating pages for your site that can rank for your chosen keywords. The better your page rank, the better your site will rank in Google as a whole. Some still believe that working in as many keywords as possible on each page is a viable strategy, but it’s really not effective anymore. Instead, you just need to include keywords naturally in your content.
Content Creation
Speaking of content, you’ll need to create plenty of it that matches your keywords. A simple way to do this is by creating blog posts each day that relates to your business or problems your customers might have. Going back to the supplement shop example, a fitness and health blog with regularly updated posts would be a great start. You could also host product reviews or tutorials on your site. You can even work with other sites in your niche to gain more exposure. Guest blogging is a good example, and you can find opportunities by either looking for sites that accept guest posts, or you could pitch ideas to related sites.
Your content should also have descriptive URLs and meta tags. This is useful for drawing attention, and it can help search engines better understand your intended purpose.
Seeking Experts
If you need more help after making your initial efforts, there’s no shame in calling in the pros. SEO is hard, and services like linklaboratory can help out with link building and other challenging aspects of SEO. They can even help you build on the strategies you already have in place.
