Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important parts of a good digital marketing plan. Online business has grown so much in the last few years, but also, so has the level of competition, with every business trying to rank on the first page of search engine results for relevant search queries. Research shows that 70% of web traffic goes to the first few websites, with the rest distributed over the other sites on the first page. Almost no traffic makes it through to the next page.
What this means is that if you are serious about doing business on the internet, you are going to need a strategy to get noticed. Search engine optimization, properly done, will help your website rank on the first page of search results, which will help your business attract the best leads. To achieve this, you could hire a professional SEO manager, or if you have a bit of time on your hands, follow the simple tips we will share with you in this article.
Even if you decide to go ahead and hire an SEO manager, you still need to know the basics of SEO to avoid getting ripped off by so-called experts. Here are 6 basic tips everyone can follow to do their SEO by themselves.
1. Start with your target audience in mind
A massive amount of internet traffic goes through search engines on a daily basis. Not all of them are interested in your products or services, but if you are able to figure out which of them are, then you will be able to plan your SEO campaign accordingly. Knowing your target market will be the foundation of everything else that you will do for your SEO, especially keyword research.
In developing a profile of your target market, the factors to take into account are their age, gender, location, income status, and common pain points. Pain points are the peculiar needs or problems that the members of your target market are looking to solve. And knowing their pain point you will recognize the context of their research, thus plan in advance for such “searches”.
Once you have done this, you will be ready for the next stage, which is keyword research.
2. Understand keyword research and planning
Once you know who your target market is, and what their pain points are, you should be looking to create some content that will help them solve those issues. Good content shows search engines what your website is about, and helps them decide when to serve your content up in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Since you have a good picture of who your target market is, you will probably have some good ideas of the kind of content they might be searching for. To develop a more precise idea of what content to create for your audience, however, you should do a bit of keyword research.
Using free tools such as the Google keyword planner, you will be able to figure out what terms the members of your target market regularly search for in connection with the products or services that you offer.
These terms could be either single words or short phrases. Once you have discovered what they are, your next task will be to strategically include them in the content that you create for your website. This will be explained in the next step.
3. Create some great content
In digital marketing, content is king is a popular mantra, and you can read all about that here. In principle, once you know what the relevant keywords to look for are, then you simply need to create some content and include those keywords in it. Some years ago, this may have been almost true, but the competition on the internet has grown massively and most of your competitors will probably be trying to rank for the same keywords as you.
To beat the competition, you will not only need to include the relevant keywords in your search, but you will also need to make sure that your content is better than your competitor’s content. Search engines do not generally publish the entire list of factors that they take into consideration, but as a rule of thumb, they try to measure how much quality your content provides when compared to other similar pieces of content provided by your competitors.
Here are a few of the factors you should know about:
Length of your content
Longer articles tend to provide more information, and more information is likely to be more helpful to readers. At the minimum, content should never be less than 300 words, but realistically you should be aiming for 800 or more words.
Originality
Plagiarism is a huge no-no when it comes to SEO, so even if you do borrow some ideas from your competitors, be sure to write the content in your own words.
Readability
Writing for the internet is a bit different from writing a novel or a textbook for example. Generally, you should look to keep your content as simple and easy to read as possible. This means using shorter sentences and paragraphs, and including enough transition words so that your writing flows in a logical manner. Prepostseo is a great tool to use.
Outbound links
Outbound links are links that lead readers to other websites and are usually used to buttress or provide authority for a fact. Including outbound links to high-authority websites is an important signal that your content provides depth and useful information for readers.
Optimized images.
Nice pictures help to keep visitors hanging around your website longer. This will help you keep a low bounce rate (the speed at which people leave your website). A low bounce rate is important to have because high bounce rates send a signal to search engines that your website does not provide the sort of content that searchers are looking for.
To optimize your images, first, use a photo editing tool to reduce their file sizes. Or use image optimizer tools such as Optimizilla. Next, save the files using the relevant keyword. Once the images are then uploaded onto the website, be sure to also include the target keyword in the “alt” description.
Conclusion
There is so much more that goes into great SEO, but for a small business owner, you will be off to a great start if you get these basics right.
