Whether it’s Bing, Google, or Yahoo, search results that will appear on top of search engine’s results pages will depend on how relevant your content is to users or depending on what they’re looking for.
That’s why SEO (search engine optimization) is crucial for your business to survive in the online world. In a nutshell, SEO is a practice that increases the organic traffic to your site using several tactics.
But before we head to these various SEO techniques that will help you boost your site’s traffic, let’s first talk about why an SEO strategy is vital to your business.
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ToggleHow SEO Helps Your Business
With literally billions of websites on the internet today, how will you manage to stand out?
Because the digital landscape is a highly competitive environment, your site should be optimized to boost your rankings on search engines.
Meaning, if you have regularly published high-quality content and you have a site that’s user-friendly and easily navigatable, you can be one of the top players in the rankings game.
Also, most users click on the top five results on the search engine results pages. So, reaching this coveted spot boosts brand awareness, ROI, conversions, and eventually profits in the long run.
This also lets your business stay ahead of the competition in every aspect, builds trust in your website and business, and gains more customers.
If you want to develop an SEO strategy for your business, here are some handy SEO strategies that actually work and won’t break the bank.
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most effective (and cost-effective) marketing strategies out there. The important thing here is to decide which type of platform will fit your business and create content that will meet your customers’ needs.
Social media is also an excellent platform to represent your business just the way you want it, letting you interact with your fans.
As a business owner, this also gives you the upper hand since it provides a sense of security and familiarity to your customers.
So, if you currently are on social media and you’re not getting as much traffic as you want to, you might want to consider adjusting your strategies and even tap into a couple of paid campaigns to help keep the ball rolling.
2. Blogging
It’s true, blogging takes a long time to build, and it will take you an inordinate amount of passion, dedication, time, and effort to run a successful blog.
In the same way, it should also provide content that offers value to your readers if you want to make it successful. If you want to compete with the most popular keywords on Google Search, you need to make sure that your content will stand out from any other article that’s ranking.
Just remember, though, that writing your content will cost you. If you can write blogs by yourself, then great.
But if writing blogs isn’t your thing, you can always ask someone from your team to curate content for you or work with a reputable company that offers affordable seo services. You can even recruit your whole team to share their whole experience.
There are many types of articles that you can get started with. These can be tips, top 10 lists, how-tos, tutorials, and a couple of handy resources.
3. External Linking
To make your content appear to be even more credible and valuable to your readers, place links to quality resources.
This can be a website that provides additional helpful information on the topic you cover. Similarly, this can also showcase information on a particular piece that you wrote.
Either way, make sure that the links you add are relevant to your content and audience. Similarly, the links that you’re linking to should be high-quality as well.
You can link to high-authority websites or those that have high rankings.
Similarly, the links that place should provide your readers more in-depth knowledge of the particular topic that you’re covering.
This will massively help your site visitors and boost your relevancy on search engines by linking to these sites. This might also send out trust signals to search engines, which will increase your rankings over time.
Just make sure that you’re not using outbound links a lot, though. If your content is filled with a lot of links, then it might lose out on visitors. If you’re always sending them away, then they might not make it through your content.
It’s also vital that these links open out to a new tab. That way, your site visitors won’t have to leave your site.
4. Title And Meta Tags Optimization
To optimize on SEO, your title should ideally be around 50-60 characters and should have your main keyword right at the beginning.
Now, your meta description is usually the texts which show up under the title of the page. Usually, it’s one of the first few sentences of your text. But you can also optimize it to make it compelling for readers that are scanning for results.
Think of it as some ad to your page, as if you’re convincing someone why they should click through. It also helps that at least one or two of your primary keywords will show up on the meta description.
If you’re using WordPress, you can try installing the SEO by Yoast plug-in to have an overview of what your page’s title and meta tags will look like.
5. Keyword Research
It would help if you also used keywords strategically. That’s because keywords act as a cornerstone of your blogs, almost like a glue that binds your writing together.
See to it that the keywords you choose fit seamlessly to your writing, though. Also, make sure that they’re used within context. You’ll hurt your site’s SEO if you overstuff your content with multiple keywords.
Ideally, pick one or two for your content and one that isn’t highly competitive.
Google’s Keyword Tool and Google Trends are great free tools that will provide you with the data that you need to master these keywords.
6. Google My Business Listing
Since Google is the most popular search engine, being on Google My Business makes it easier to be found.
You can easily sign up and claim your business profile. Once you verify your account, you can easily update information about your business.
Google My Business adds your location, so you’re easily searchable via Google Maps, adds your contact details, promotions, and images. It also comes with a feature that lets you respond to online reviews.
7. Boost Site Speed
Your site’s speed is one of the main determinants of whether or not your site will rank on search engines.
The thing is, page speed matters to search engines because it gives off a better user experience.
Ensure that your site loads quickly by compressing images of web pages, allowing browser caching, or getting rid of any unnecessary codes on your website.
The Bottomline
Although optimizing the SEO of your site isn’t cheap, this shouldn’t also leave you and your business in mountains of debt.
These five great optimization tactics can be excellent starting points that you can easily implement without costing a lot of money.
Applying these tactics can significantly improve your site’s SEO is the most cost-effective way.