According to research conducted by BrightEdge, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. Moreover, B2B companies earn twice as much revenue from organic search than from any other channel.
This is why it's critical to invest in strategic search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your digital marketing plan. Yet, for many small business owners, the question of how to optimize your online presence can be daunting to answer.
Fortunately, your SEO strategy doesn't have to break the bank to be effective. These five optimization tips can help you start to build an online audience for your brand, nurture leads, and convert page viewers into paying customers.
If you don't know where to start, start with the market. SEO for beginners takes what you know about your audience, and it lets you show them what differentiates your business from the next.
First, research your intended audience for your product. What is your value proposition to your customers?
Then, see where your business stands in the competitive marketplace. You can even create a competitive analysis grid. How are your competitors meeting potential customers' needs?
How are you going to meet potential customers' needs better than the competition?
Once you've established that, it's time for keyword research. This is akin to Google search optimization.
Keyword research shows you what words and phrases people are typing into Google—or other search engines—when they have problems your business can solve.
When you know these terms, and how your potential customers are using them, you can start creating content.
You'll want to develop content for your business' website.
You can also optimize content for any other place people search. Your business can optimize its Amazon page, YouTube channel, and other social media profiles with SEO strategies.
Developing content means giving potential customers what they're looking for. This might be information, instruction, thought leadership, or even entertainment. Use the keywords you've learned to write relevant content.
As you develop content, you also want to shape its presentation. Come up with:
Don't lose sight of your goal: communicate your business' value to the audience.
After you create optimized content for your website, store, and social channels, improve your audience's experience of your site pages. Part of SEO is improving your page load speed and optimizing your site for mobile.
When your site loads faster, fewer people bounce. People are also more apt to stick around when a site is well-organized. Ideally, it should be easy to read and navigate.
High-quality links and backlinks tell search engines that your site is trustworthy and useful. When someone shares information on their own site, or they link back to it in a post, it improves your site's placement on search results pages.
The best thing you can do is get high-quality sites to link back to yours. But, be careful: low-quality backlinks can reduce your site's traffic.
You can use tools that rank website credibility to see which sites in your niche are trustworthy.
Google uses a crawler to understand and rank websites. It's important to make your site as visible and appealing to the crawler as it is to your audience. Consider:
Each of these tools can improve your site's appeal to crawlers, without curbing its appeal to actual humans.
SEO isn't one size fits all. Whether you want to focus on link-building, or your need to improve your local SERPs ranking, there are tools out there for you.
At BrisTechTonic, we've empowered thousands of small businesses to thrive online. Contact us today, and we'll help you learn how to optimize your web presence to get the results you want.