There is no doubt that being included in the search index is difficult when a new site is live. And if you don’t know the search engine optimization (SEO) tips and tricks, how will you get your site to the top? If you do not understand the best SEO practices, you are leaving your site in the dark, i.e., no one will know about it, no clicks, no visitors, no sales.
The reality is that SEO is not rocket science. Sure, it takes time and effort to master the subtle nuances, but the truth is, you have to spend years learning the basics to optimize your site correctly, primarily if you use the right tools, Huh.
There are several ways of SEO strategy for businesses.
Have you ever heard that a professional speaker divides your audience into tips and tricks for “get rich quick” or “quick clipping”? The situation with such pitches is that they were explicitly designed for attracting the audience’s attention. They were approached to maintain their attention, and ultimately they arrived with a “true” request or pitch.
The thing is that once the audience is sold, many members of the audience realize that there is no quick way to achieve the desired goals – at least not without the hard work involved.
Although businesses and brands can approach their SEO strategies in many ways, with the ultimate goal of improving their digital presence and expanding their reach to potential customers, or sponsors, this article will discuss the essential points that any brand must pass to be successful in its SEO strategy.
Understanding Search Engine Platforms for Optimization
Before your business or brand can start optimizing your SEO strategy for success, you need to understand both your target audience and the audience’s behavioral habits. This means asking questions:
- Do our audiences use and/or experience our brand/products primarily through the desktop or mobile searches?
- What questions do viewers ask when they contact us?
- What digital content do our viewers expect or want to see from us?
- Is our online information up to date and 100%?
- Does our existing online information and content correspond to the message we want to convey to our audience?
Note that these questions should not be asked in terms of “one size fits all” for your SEO strategy. This is because the target audience does not just use search engines to find your business or brand’s content. These questions should also be asked to help optimize their digital presence on other such platforms, such as:
- Mobile App Store
- Video hosting platform (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo)
- Social media platforms (e.g., Instagram,Facebook,LinkedIn)
- Third-party platforms (e.g., Amazon, Yelp)
The overall goal of understanding many search platforms is to maximize the visibility of products or services offered to the brand and target audience. By optimizing your brand presence and content on these platforms, you can start optimizing a strategy that improves your SEO performance and your customers’ search experience.
Understand that your content is primarily for people
Sometimes, it is easy to forget that our brands’ digital presence and their online presence are ultimately for the people and not the search engines themselves. As such, any SEO strategy’s broad goal is to maximize brand reach through SEO to increase consumer traffic and engagement.
Here, the goal is to create content that targets customers, not search engines. If you are wondering how to do this, here are some steps:
- Know the context of how and why customers are searching for your brand
- Identify three to five specific keywords and some other long-term keywords (e.g., words) that customers will use to find your brand or products.
- Understand the intent of the keywords you want to use in your SEO ranking with your client environment and general keywords
For example, suppose customers see your brand as a source of information or data, such as a weekly newspaper. In that case, you may add a few additional small keywords (e.g., “email marketing” to improve the presence of websites in search queries “) that can be used as they help to answer the questions that your customers are looking for.
However, suppose your brand is a digital marketing agency that aims to improve your digital transaction rate. In that case, you can use longer and more specific keywords (e.g., “cross-channel corporate marketing channels”) to improve your ranking, leading to increased content traffic and a greater likelihood of reaching higher transaction rates.
The goal is to give your target audience what you want. This can be achieved by getting high-quality written copy, visual content such as easy-to-read infographics, and ensuring that both are mobile-friendly with your SEO strategy.
Optimize your content, data, and resources
The final step to ensure the success of a brand’s SEO strategy is one word: content.
Without content – whether it is written, visual, or otherwise – your brand does not have as much benefit as it offers to its target audience or customers. Your brand will have almost zero visibility online or will be in digital locations when you are spotted.
Here are some quick questions to make sure your content published by your brand and delivered to your audience is optimized for SEO search:
- Is our current content messaging and target product/service specific to the audience?
- What can we get from Google’s “ask” or “related searches” to improve our content’s effectiveness?
- Have we addressed any previous questions about customer service, feedback and/or commitment? If not, how can we improve our content to best address and resolve these issues?
- Have we reviewed our existing digital content to ensure that it meets or exceeds our competitors’ quality?
- Is your content optimized for mobile-friendly searches, devices, and users?
When you ask and answer these questions, you can optimize your online content, data, and resources to improve your SEO ranking and customer experience.
Some of the ways to start the process are as follows:
- Optimize URLs for each page of your site with a URL description
- Keep the value proposition exposed, front and center.
- Use internal links; they take users and search engine spiders from one page to another on your site.
- Where appropriate, include external links to relevant third-party websites or content to improve brand positioning and expertise.
Some of the more advanced functions may include:
- Work with your webmaster to meet Google’s “core vitals” and page speed requirements.
- Add a structured tag (schema.org) for all relevant web pages and in-web elements, such as business information, ratings, videos, and images.
- Improving the mobile experience to conform to search engine standards, with the ultimate goal of providing an experience that requires a few thumbs of touch to operate.
By implementing these essential steps, your business or brand will be on track to ensure your SEO strategy’s success in the coming weeks and months.