Understanding the current state of your website is what can help you to build a successful business.
Every marketer knows the importance of SEO strategy. Its tactics are so complicated sometimes that it requires technically-advanced, creative and strategic digital marketing company to overcome.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is an ongoing process which helps your business gain visibility in search engines and drive targeted traffic to your website. In comparison to paid advertisements, its traffic is organic. In short, it is the base of your sales and conversions.
No matter with an SEO agency or do-it-yourself SEO tips, you need to have an SEO-friendly website. However, trusting an experienced digital marketing company will keep you away from strategic errors.
Why does your business needs to have an SEO strategy in place?
There are countless reasons for including SEO strategies in your business. Generally speaking, it is the number one action, through which you manage to reach your customers. However, it offers some other values, including:
– SEO offers long-lasting results:
Although the process can seem long and take months, it promises long-term benefits. Business itself is an investment, hence investing your time does not mean wasting it. Marketers that think it as an asset to their businesses, will surely achieve stable success.
– SEO is more affordable in comparison to other paid strategies:
Hiring an SEO agency will be more cost-effective than other marketing tactics. Besides, it has an evident advantage. Unlike paid options, (like PPC management) you will not lose your website traffic the moment you stop paying, as it is organic.
– SEO builds trust:
It helps to make your business better and stronger. People who find your business in the top of search engines think your business to be trustworthy and credible.
– SEO creates great opportunities for your business.
Regardless of what you offer, the success of your business depends on sales and potential customers. Well optimized SEO tactics will surely help to gain both.
As you see how important SEO is for your business, it is time to implement some great strategies that can increase traffic, conversions and sales:
1. Build a website;
A successful ecommerce business starts with an implementation of an SEO-friendly tactics. If you think of it beforehand and make a constant check, you will never face the problem of rebuilding it again. Google and search engines rank your website based on a number of reasons:
– Website navigation;
– Keywords;
– Mobile Friendliness;
– Backlinks;
– User Experience;
– Speed.
This, however, is not the end of the list. You need to make research at the very moment you start your business. With new coming trends and techniques, you need to follow market novelties for never harming your website performance.
2. Make an SEO audit;
Auditing your website is another important strategy that your business needs. It informs you about many important SEO details and takes an overall image of whether your website is well-optimized for search engines. If you fail to fix the errors and problems, you will put your website under the risk of being penalized. It seems to take you much time, however, it is really necessary for your business. Auditing your website will help you in determining an SEO strategy, as it identifies all the factors that have an effect on your search position.
3. Do a competitive analysis;
Competitive analysis for SEO will help to build your own campaign based on the market demand. It greatly informs you about the tactics that bring success to your competitors. Mixing some “working” tactics and including them in your own business plan, you can make your business even stronger. You need to start this process by identifying your top competitors. Your aim should be doing things better in order to outrank them, not exactly repeating their actions. Besides the analysis, you can read the reviews of their customers to avoid repeating the weak points that they have in their businesses.
4. Follow best practices;
As it is an over-changing process, you can never be sure, that using successful tactics, which have brought success some powerful companies years before will work the same way for your business. Constantly following marketing changes and updating your tactics will be a powerful tool for building a great strategy, which will be compatible in current and future trends. You will stay out of the marketplace if you fail to keep up. Regardless of the fact that it can take you time, it will help you to keep quality and generate creative and innovative ideas for your own website.
5. Find out website optimization goals;
Optimizing your website can have a great number of goals depending on your business type. However, bringing all the businesses into one platform we can say that they all share some important common goals which are:
– Improving website performance;
– Boosting website ranking;
– Improving user experience;
– Increasing sales;
– Improving post-purchase customer experience.
These are the basics that all the businesses share and need to have a business growth. Making use of different website optimization tools, will make the process easy and more effective. Your strategy itself needs a good strategy to make success.
6. Make a plan;
Planning your business ideas and actions beforehand outlines the important actions and step by step takes your business to its goals. You need to plan every detail: starting from your business type to the budget you are ready to invest. Planning can help you in decision-making process referring to the things that your business needs. For example, you can calculate your budget for understanding which website builder or digital marketing agency you can afford. You can minimize the circle and research the ones that is affordable for you. SEO tactics must as well be an integral part of your business plan.
7. Research and find best keywords;
Creating an SEO strategy without a detailed keyword research will hardly be possible. Determining and using strategic keywords are crucial for targeting searchers. The most important thing in this process is to understand the searcher intent. However, you should be very attentive with search engines as well. Effective keywords are essential, but overdoing them can harm your website. Before doing a keyword research you need to simplify some questions for you (Who are your customers? What do people search? How do they do it? etc.). Identifying such type of questions will help to better target them and improve your ranking.
8. Think of the users;
Search engine ranking is directly connected to user behavior. Effective SEO means customers’ trust which bring high ranking and successful sales. People are ready to make deals when their needs are covered. For this, you should find out who are your audience, what they value. Understanding it will help to better target them and increase customer satisfaction. Besides, user experience is toughly connected to SEO. The improvement of each builds your website. For this, you can:
– Integrate your UX and SEO strategies;
– Cover SEO principles in your website design;
– Be responsive to customer queries: Provide with excellent customer support service;
– Focus on quality.
9. Improve and update your content;
Publishing great content and giving new information will always work. However, there is one tactic as well that you can include in your SEO strategies for increasing your ranking in search engines: constantly updating your old contents. It will not take you much time, but it will give immediate results. Updating your content can show Google that your content is fresh and worth-sharing, as well will help you to improve the accuracy of the information you give. With the new changes your information becomes old and unusable. People want just the opposite: fresh and relevant information, which will include all the needed details.
10. Build a community.
Does community building have connection to your SEO strategy? It DOES have! Active communities nowadays can do more for your website than you think. Building up a community means earning more traffic, higher engagement and conversions. Nevertheless, it does not mean just having online presence in different social media channels. It means putting a focus on your customer’s interests, concerns, needs and motivations. This process has many positive effects on SEO, since through it you can get many content “shares”, and generate reviews in the public discussions. It has a great role for search engines.
Building a good SEO strategy is not just following these tips. It is more than that. These are just actions that bring you to the right point of your business development process. Including them in your actions, you can mix it with your creative ideas bringing a more competitive advantage to your website. Success will never come if you do not make actions. SEO does not happen accidentally. You need to put much endeavor, implement great tactics, continually test it in order to win the competition and rank in search engines.
Author
Tigran is a marketing and creative content specialist at Smarketa.com with a primary focus on SEO, PPC and customer satisfaction for eCommerce business. Being a true humanist he draws inspiration from the simple thing as everyday life and the matters one come across on a daily bases doing his best and above to help everyone around.