SEO strategies are very important to boost online business. As any smart SEO knows, it’s crucial to make a strategy before you work on improving the rank a webpage. SEO is a complicated process. It’s not easy for businesses to understand all the information at once. So here are 15 SEO strategies you can start with to boost online business presence.
Design content for the entire customer journey
To boost online business through the right SEO strategies, the first thing you need to do is to check if your content covers the entire customer journey or it just reflects your readiness to sell.
In simple terms, your website should have content for all the stages of the buyer’s journey. Many websites overlook content that ignites interest. As a result, people visit their website and go away without making a buying decision. Remember that SEO is not just about driving traffic. At the end of the day, your business needs conversion.
Build a strong linking structure
Just like how you organize folders and files on your laptop, content on your website needs to be organized in the same way. People who are visiting your website should be able to find what they are looking for. Not only the users, but even search engines will struggle to find content if your site structure is poor.
When it comes to internal linking, search engines pay attention to how your content is linked. Web pages, blog posts need to be interlinked and there should be relevancy and connection between the anchor text and the link. Instead of focusing on publishing ‘n’ number of articles, think about which pages, products, and blogs you can link to each other. Here are few informations about optimizing your internal link structure.
Less jargons, more answers
Many great brands fail to convey their message properly and that’s when people start assuming and the marketing ship starts sinking. All the successful SEO strategies focus on one important thing – direct and clear communication. If you are not putting efforts into answering questions through your content, you are losing customers.
To boost online business growth, you should answer some important questions such as what is your product and why people should buy it. How your product makes the buyer’s life better? With that said, you should also highlight your call to action statements to help customers understand what they should do next. It is not just limited to the web copy, make sure that your Meta title, Meta description, and keywords also work in harmony.
Choose a mobile website over a mobile app
Mobile apps are great but the excitement businesses showed in developing mobile apps wasn’t the same among the end users. People use mobile apps but they still prefer visiting websites. In 2018 and beyond, having a mobile website is and will be more important than ever.
Even if you want to ignore the reports that say a majority of consumers prefer websites over apps, you should know that generating money from an app won’t be easy in future. People will still earn, but the amount of money they will earn and the competition they will face aren’t worth fighting for.
Establish yourself on new platforms
If you don’t know, Google and Amazon will soon compete against each other for one more reason, a YouTube competitor. Like this, there are many things happening in the tech world and their impact on the digital marketing space will be significant in terms of SEO and social media marketing.
So when the signs are clear that more platforms are poised to grow in the future, start putting efforts into making good content on those new platforms and establish yourself. It may take time, but at least you will be focusing more on content delivery rather than beating the competition.
Optimize for voice search
Despite mobile and desktop search growth, voice search is rapidly becoming popular with solutions like Google Assistant are available on a budget to high-end smartphones. Google Assistant is popular on Android phones while Siri is available on iOS. For Windows 10 users, Cortana is useful in search and now when Microsoft and Amazon have inked a partnership deal, both Siri and Cortana will work on Windows 10 and Amazon Echo speakers. This is the right time to consider voice search for your SEO strategy.
Focus on related keywords
To boost your online business presence in search engine results, you need smart SEO strategies that not only focus on a broad keyword but also intelligently use related key phrases. If you have observed, Google search results not only show the exact key phrases in the meta description and titles but sometimes, you will also see synonyms of certain words being highlighted in the search results.
Keep in mind that when it comes to keywords, Google gives more importance to text content. You may be having a lot of keywords in your videos, images and other content formats, but for Google, text matters and that’s how it determines your web page’s relevance with search queries.
Rich snippets and schema markup aren’t buzzwords
Not many people want to get their website listed in Google News for obvious reasons, but if your business can utilize this one of the least-used SEO strategies then you should definitely do it. Schema markup is a code that you put on your website pages and as a result, search engines return more related information for users.
Your website content gets indexed by search engines and then it is returned as it is in the search results. But if you observe closely, some results on search engines include additional information they extract from the target websites. You should definitely take advantage of these things to boost online business presence.
Let an SEO expert sit with your developer
If you’re starting a new website or already managing one, you need someone to take care of the development part. Now that person needs to be able to wear different hats at least for some time. If your developer is not familiar with the core SEO tactics, find a reliable SEO expert who can help the developer to make sure that your website is SEO friendly.
This small teamwork can make a huge impact on your rankings because no matter how much people talk about other elements, SEO starts from the domain itself. The moment you choose your domain name, your decisions start determining your website’s ranking.
Make your website load faster
It’s now or never for online businesses because an average user waits no more than 5 seconds. So if your website is not loading in that much time, you are losing visitors and obviously the potential customers. A website that performs poorly on different web browsers and platforms can’t achieve higher ranking in search results.
Speed matters and if your website is slow, invest in the right resources. Upgrade your server if you haven’t done already. Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript codes. Enable Gzip compression and image optimization. That way, you can reduce the load time.
Set an amplification strategy
You are creating high-quality content, publishing and distributing it on social media and your in-house army of social media experts knows how to spread the word. That’s really great, but there’s one more thing that you can add to your SEO strategies to boost online business success and that thing is a simple list of people who can help you reach a wide audience. Keep this list ready because if your content gets picked by even a single popular media outlet or some social media influencers, you can expect results you have never imagined.
Keep investigating the search results
Search engines make changes in their algorithm and there’s no fixed schedule for the same. At any time, you can expect Google and other tech giants to make such changes so as to keep yourself updated, investigating the search results at least once a week. You can perform a test search query with any keyword and pay attention to what the search engine brings to you. Do it often and try to find out reasons why some pages are ranking at their respective positions. If you do it regularly, you will be able to track changes and it can help you find out why a website lost ranking and what made a website achieve a higher rank.
Buy an SSL certificate
If you don’t know, Google Chrome has started marking websites as “not secure” if there’s no SSL certificate installed on the server. To check the difference, just pay attention to the text written before your domain name on a web browser’s address bar. If it shows “HTTP” it means your website doesn’t use SSL certificate.
Websites that use SSL certificate have “https” at the beginning of the URLs. For online businesses, especially the ones that collect payment online, SSL certificate is a must. Providing a safe and secure environment for your customers should be on your list of SEO strategies for your website.
Allow crawling and indexing
It may sound very basic thing to people who are playing in the advanced SEO space, but for starters, this is a very important thing to remember. Crawling means you are allowing Google’s spiders (bots) to visit your website pages, check content and report to Google. Indexing also works in the same way. When you allow indexing, Google and other search engines add your website pages to their website directories. On WordPress, some users unknowingly select the option that restricts search engine spiders from visiting the website.
Never ignore the basics
Some things will most probably won’t change in the search engine space and you should include them in your SEO strategies for guaranteed success. Basics like writing meta titles and meta description, natural keyword usage, improved readability, social media integration, link building, and many other off-page and on page SEO tactics should not be ignored. If you are not familiar with the basics, don’t rely too much on outdated information. Speak to a trustworthy SEO professional or a digital marketing agency for better understanding.
If you do all that, it would be enough for your business success. You need to analyze few SEO techniques to boost business. However, keep in mind that you should optimize your SEO strategies from time to time to make sure that you’re not doing anything against your potential search rankings.