Search engine optimization (SEO) remains one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. It has been estimated that, at a minimum, 93% of all internet experiences begin with an internet search. People are not inclined to go past the first page of the search engine search results, you know your site needs to find itself as high up as it can get. No digital marketing campaign is complete without an SEO component. Here are some tips to help you get the most from your SEO efforts:
- Find the best keywords. This may go without saying that your SEO marketing needs to start by finding the best keywords for your business. You can start by deciding what terms or phrases you want to be what people look for to find you. Next, you need to find out what search terms are actually being used by internet users. There are some free tools you can use to help you with this. Google has a nice Keyword Planner that can be very helpful in finding the right keywords for a site.
- Check up on what your competition is doing. They are looking at you, you should look at them. Before you do that, make sure you switch your browsing preferences so that you are doing it privately. They do not need to know what you are going. Do your search and look at what the top sites are doing. See if you can learn from any of it. There is always room for improvement in the world of website design.
- Your content needs to be the best. This is one of the hardest parts of digital marketing. Your content needs to be well written, informative, engaging and helpful. Google owns somewhere between 65 and 70% of the market share in the search engine world. You will do better with the search engine if you have better content. You will also get more visitors return to your website. More traffic looks good to the search engine. You will eventually see a snowball effect happening. The more useful your content is, the more people will visit your site. Just do not sacrifice your writing quality for anything.
- Your page title, URL and headers need your keyword. Many people overlook this but it is important to have your keywords in these three places. When people search for it, you want these two areas to be a part of the search results. You also help the search engine spiders that are zipping around the internet looking for sites to index. By using your keywords in areas other than just your content, you help them find you and list you where you want to be listed.
- Do not forget to label your images correctly. Yes, an image is worth a thousand words but not to Google. Search engines index text, not images so you need to use your keywords in the title of the image, the alt-tag and the description of that image.
- Link to your other content. Throughout your content you should have links to other content on your websites. The best SEO marketing experts will tell you that this drives traffic to other parts of your page, which helps with Google. Before you do that, check out the content you will be linking to and see if it needs any updating or tweaking.
- Get people to link to you. This is possibly the best way to drive traffic to your website. Third party validators are invaluable in showing the world and search engines just how valuable your content actually is. How do you do that? Reach out to complementary websites and see you can build up a relationship to work together to both of your benefit.
- Be mindful of local SEO. If you are a local business, you are really going to want to use some local keywords. For instance, if someone was looking for an SEO company that was near where they were and they were located on Long Island, they would do a search for “SEO on Long Island.” If that describes you, you should include that phrase.
SEO marketing is not as complicated as it may seem but it does take some effort and tweaking