What exactly is SEO? It's not just a buzzword, it's a term that encompasses an array of processes that will improve your website's visibility in search engines such as Google, and through that raise the number of visitors to your site. For businesses, this increased traffic will be useful in generating more leads and returns.
In this day and age, no business can go without SEO. If you want to remain in the playing field, keep up with peers and competitors, and remain relevant, you need this. Otherwise, you face the risk of fading into obscurity, remaining unseen by potential clients and leads.
Here’s a rundown of the processes behind SEO and how they come together to help your website and ultimately your business.
Business Requirements What is your target demographic? It’s important to understand the reality of SEO and its potential results so that requirements will be based on realistic expectations. There is a balancing act between unrealistic pie in the sky notions thought SEO will gain you millions of followers and skeptical users who do not see the value in SEO.
Website Analysis Before starting, your website has to be analyzed to determine how well it is currently performing and what needs to be improved. After the SEO process, analysis is necessary to measure the differences made by the changes. Google Analytics is an amazing tool for monitoring traffic to the site. Other tools include: -Yoast SEO for Wordpress, SEMrush or SEOquake allow you to see how well pages and content are formatted and whether the Google Gods will favor it. -Backlink Analyzers like Moz, Ahrefs, Linkody and others enable you you check if all your backlinks and keywords are in order since spammy backlinks are penalized by Google. -SEO Crawlers analyze your site to check if you have broken links, landing pages missing important meta tags or duplicate content that the search engines might dislike.
Website Optimization A streamlined website with a functional backend will be a big help when it comes to SEO. Broken links, empty pages, and even spelling and grammar mistakes will not only turn away audiences but disorganized sites can give search engines a hard time indexing your pages. Submitting your site map to search engines is also good for SEO. Site maps are text files that detail the arrangement and hierarchy of your site. With this, engines like Google can make better sense of your page structure. Site security also matters. So update your website software to keep it safe from being hacked and defaced by trolls, while protecting vital information. Unsafe sites obviously won't perform as well on search engines.
Link Building The amount of backlinks, or other sites that link back to your site, will factor into your search engine ranking. It's even better when these sites are verified, particularly major ones like Google My Business, Yelp, and search directories related to your field. Beware of dodgy "link farms" promising unaware customers that they'll get hundreds of links. Their results will be obviously inorganic and numerous irrelevant links will raise red flags, possibly incurring penalties from the likes of Google.
Keyword Research With keyword research, you can determine what people are searching for, how many people are looking for it, and in what medium they prefer said information in. By knowing what's in demand, you can then tailor your content so that they'll align with what people are looking for. This way you can bring customers closer to your business and its products and services. There are keyword research tools that can help with this. Moreover, some keywords can be more general and others can be more specific. So it's important to diversify the types of keywords you are using, from generalized ones to those aimed at more specific niches. Your content writing and creation strategy can help with this, as you can have pages for said general keywords as well as ones tackling specialized subjects.
Content Writing Want to boost the number of visitors to your page? One surefire way to generate authentic traffic is by having unique and valuable content that will draw them in, which will then raise your search rankings. So you'll need to stock up on unique articles, stories and images. Don't just copy-paste from other sites or use material that's too similar or repetitive, this won't get nearly as good results and plagiarism will be penalized. It also helps if your content is well-organized for audiences. If you are discussing one topic, then have it on one page. Another topic gets another page. This also makes it easier for search engine algorithms to process your site. Make sure your blogs and articles aren't just streams of keywords, make sure the terms you are using are relevant and sensibly used. Keyword salads will turn off audiences and the algorithms might get wise to this.
SEO Submission After you've implemented all these steps to make sure it performs better on search engines, you have to be sure it actually shows up on said engines. Try running a search, if it doesn't come up then you should check out the ways to submit your site. If it still doesn't come up, then it's possible your site went against their SEO guidelines and was removed from the directory. Shady tactics result in blacklisting. In this case, you better fix up your site and submit it again.
Takeaway
Having a solid SEO strategy not only means a better user experience but also increases traffic, engagement and conversions on your website. Just remember this is an ongoing process that requires updates to the business requirements and keywords over time. As your business evolves, modifications in your SEO strategies are necessary.
SEO is a long term strategy that’s relatively cheap to implement. So don’t take it lightly, because it has a lot to offer! If you’re ready to take your website’s SEO to the next level, contact us today.
Next Wave is a Charlotte website design company. We have been doing websites since 1998. Our teams combined experience with websites touches all areas, SEO, Social Media, Graphics, Layouts, Mobile, and much more.
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