So you have built a website for your small business but you can’t see any results? You can’t see the expected surge in conversion or engagement? Well, you might have the best looking website in the industry, but if you don’t rank highly for target keywords, your target audience might not find you.
Search engine optimization (SEO) will help your business get noticed by the millions of internet users. Many shoppers start their search for products and services online. If your business is not visible on search engine result pages (SERPs) for specific keywords, you’ll struggle to get any traffic or to convert. This post looks at simple ways to boost your site’s SEO performance.
Identify Your Audience
Are you targeting the right audience with your marketing campaigns? Many business owners are in a hurry to sell their brand and they overlook the importance of audience identification. The target audience comprises people who go to search engines to find brands like yours or products/services you’re selling. These are the only people your marketing campaign should target. They’re leads who can convert into customers with the right nurturing strategies.
Defining your target audience involves extensive market research. Through the data you collect, you can create buyer personas. This is a depiction of the ideal customer who will search for your products/services or the brand on search. Defining your audience helps with more targeted marketing, which leads to more productive marketing. You create your SEO strategy with this target audience in mind, which increases the chance of success.
Create and Publish the Best Content
At the heart of your SEO campaign is content marketing. The content you create answers your audience’s questions. This can be text, video, infographics, social media posts, webinars, podcasts, and other media.
A solid content marketing strategy helps in lead generation, to connect with customers, and to build trust with your audience. It also helps to improve conversions, grow web traffic, improve social media impact, and boost your site’s search ranking. Creating great content is one of the smartest techniques for boosting success in organic search.
Leverage SEO Web Design
How good is your website? What comes to mind when most clients see this question is the aesthetics aspect of their websites. However, web design entails more than looks. A design agency not only builds you a beautiful website but they optimize it for SEO. This means your website is easy to index, and it delivers the best user experience.
A poorly designed website affects the user experience, which is a major consideration in search engine ranking. Such a website is slow to load, difficult to navigate and has multiple errors. The best website design also considers multi-device browsing. With responsive web design, small internet device users can still access your website seamlessly. Google has emphasized a mobile-first approach in search and user experience and this is enough reason to invest in the best web design.
Find the Right keywords
At the heart of a great content, strategy is keyword research. Many businesses create a lot of content, but this has no impact on search because of poor keyword research. The right keywords affect your SEO campaign by determining how easily Google crawlers find you.
Better still, the choice of the right keywords means your target audience can find you easily from SERPs. The best keywords bring relevant traffic to your website and improve the chances of conversions. With keyword research, you learn new trends, such as long-tail keywords and voice-centric keywords. You’ll identify more areas to place your keywords and this has a big impact on your SEO efforts.
Get Social
The number of social media users in 2020 stood at 3.6 billion. This number highlights the need to leverage social media for your digital marketing and SEO efforts. Today, social media platforms including Facebook, and Twitter have strong search engines.
Now that most users are on these platforms, they use the same to find products and services. If you’re big on social media, it’s easy for your target audience to find. Better still, you can leverage social media to promote your content and drive traffic to your websites. Your target audience is active on social media and this is reason enough to integrate these platforms into your SEO campaign.
Leverage Cutting-edge SEO Tools
Many small businesses don’t carry out effective SEO campaigns because of lack of resources. If you’re starting your online business, leverage readily available SEO tools to complete many SEO tasks. There are tools for website audit, link building, tracking/analytics/reporting tools, website speed insight, and SEO analysis tools,
Other applications help with keyword research tools, technical SEO audit, competitor analysis, monitoring 404 errors, optimizing your page titles and Meta descriptions, creating XML sitemaps, content analysis, email marketing and more. Some tools offer multiple functions and you have a single dashboard to control your SEO campaign. You get data in real-time which helps with decision-making.
For many businesses, search engine optimization (SEO) is an afterthought while this should be at the core of their campaigns. This could be the reason you can’t get the expected results from your website. These tips are a good start to rejuvenate your SEO campaign.