In a saturated market that is characterized by stiff competition, most businesses are concerned with how they can differentiate themselves, convert more prospects, and steer clear of the competition. One of the strategies you can use to ensure successful online advertising is search engine optimization. This practice focuses on improving your website so that it appears among the top search engine results. In effect, a successful SEO strategy will assist in generating more online traffic and increasing conversion.
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization, a process of optimizing a website to increase the visibility of the site to users of a search engine. SEO helps to increase the quality and quantity of online traffic to the website. In other words, the practice involves making specific changes to your website to make it more attractive to search engines and get unpaid traffic.
What Goes Into SEO?
If you are to have an in-depth understanding of SEO, you need to be familiar with the different parts that make up SEO. Here is what the practice is about.
- Quality of Traffic: By using the internet, you can attract different types of visitors from around the world. However, your focus will be to get visitors who are looking for particular products or services you offer. This is what is known as quality traffic. With quality traffic, you will have a higher conversion rate as well as increased sales and profits.
- Quantity of Traffic: Once you have the right people visiting your website, you will want to increase these numbers. More traffic from search engine results pages means increased brand awareness and more exposure for your business, effectively giving you opportunities to sell your products to a bigger market. More traffic also raises your conversion numbers and allows you to grow your business.
- Organic Results: Unlike paid searches, SEO makes it possible for businesses to attract organic traffic. Organic is traffic that you do not pay for but comes to the website when a user types a query into a search engine. Organic search traffic is a sustainable approach that is cost-effective in the long run and gives you a competitive edge.
Factors That Impact SEO
To be successful with SEO, you need to know the factors that can impact your SEO rankings. Here are a few things to focus on during your SEO campaign.
Content Marketing
Quality and relevant content will attract both search engines and online visitors. As such, it is important to create different types of content pieces, making sure that they feature engaging content on topics that matter most to your audience. You should also incorporate relevant keywords and keep your content fresh by updating posts regularly.
On-Page SEO
Apart from content, you will need to improve various elements that happen on your website. You should take time to optimize title tags and meta descriptions, include sub-headings, build internal links, and include keywords in image names and alt tags. Even as you do this, make sure you avoid keyword stuffing and make the site mobile-friendly.
Off-Page SEO
While you will not have much control over these factors, they also have an impact on your SEO ranking. Some of the most important off-page factors are trust, backlinks, and social signals such as likes and shares. Creating quality content will increase your chances of improving off-page SEO.
How Does it Work?
Search engines work hard to provide users with great results. Search engines have crawlers that they use to gather information about all the content that is available on the internet. They collect information about your website and web pages, allowing them to decide when to display a page on your site when a searcher enters a related query. Part of the information they collect relates to title tags, internal linking, backlinks, social signals, and page speed. Here is SEO works:
Optimized Content
In a world where content marketing is gaining in popularity, websites with optimized content are likely to rank higher. If you are to be successful with SEO, you should create quality content that includes keywords that share the searcher’s intent. Quality content will increase your authority and trust as well as satisfy searchers’ intent, which will not only improve your SEO ranking but also help you get more organic traffic.
Quality Links
Quality links from a relevant and authoritative website will help to increase your credibility and trustworthiness. Since trust is one of the off-page factors that affect ranking, building a good link profile will improve your online visibility. Generally, you are likely to earn more quality links if you create great content and promote your website. However, this takes time and effort, meaning that you should consistently publish quality content to achieve the results you desire.
User Experience
In addition to displaying relevant results, search engines also strive to provide searchers with great user experience. If you want to lift your search engine rankings, you should change different aspects of your website so that visitors have a wonderful user experience. Some of the steps you should consider taking include improving site architecture, optimizing your site for speed, and optimizing the customer journey in line with user intent.
Mobile SEO
Today, an increasingly high number of people around the world use their hand-held devices to access the internet. Since search engines are determined to display search results on all devices, they require that businesses invest in responsive design. In addition to the website design, you will have to optimize content for mobile users and enhance the mobile-friendliness of the site.
Voice Search
While voice search optimization is not a must-have at the moment, customers appear to love it. As much as it may not revolutionize SEO in the near future, businesses should start thinking of optimizing for voice search. Optimizing for voice search will increase your chances of getting found by your customers. For starters, begin by creating content in an easy language and respond to customer comments often.
Optimize Your Site Today
There is no universal formula for SEO, and the rules are not carved in stone. The secret to SEO success is to combine and experiment with different methods, analyzing the results periodically to ensure your efforts are not going to waste. Finding the right SEO packages for small businesses can go a long way in helping you achieve the best results for your business, and BizIQ can provide great and affordable solutions that small businesses can use to compete with the more established brands. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help get your business the traffic it deserves.
