If you’ve read even one article about SEO, you know the facts: Every business needs to utilize SEO strategy and best practices to enhance their online marketing. When you have a strong strategy in place, you get better placement within search engines results and thus, a higher level of visibility for your business.
But SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it task. It’s an ever-changing, ever-evolving need that must be analyzed and adjusted over time. Doing it “right” means know what’s right for your specific business.
The Importance Of A Strong SEO Strategy
First and foremost, your SEO strategy needs to be centered around the goals of your business. This includes on-page and off-page strategies that focus on keyword selection, links, and more. You may have localized goals to promote your business within a particular community or neighborhood, or you may want to focus on expanding into new markets.
Either way, you need to have a comprehensive strategy in place so you can then begin to implement a plan to improve your SEO ranking. It’s often a good idea to work with an SEO consultant or full service agency to help establish a strategy that is going to work for your business and specific goals.
As your business grows, your strategy is likely going to change. You will have moving targets based upon how your target demographics change, the products and services that you offer, and the amount of competition that you face within your target markets. This is why analytics play such an important role in measuring progress and success.
Get Your Keywords Straight
There are many SEO best practices that you are going to want to employ. The first is to establish a list of keywords that you want to target for your business. This can include:
- Short tail keywords
- Long tail keywords
- Geographic locations
There should be a combination of all of the above within your core list of keywords. It's also a good idea to establish your demographic(s) with an eye toward building keywords around them. You will not always use the same SEO strategy for every demographic.
Certain keywords may need to go into one campaign and other keywords may need to go into another campaign, although they can sometimes overlap. Tracking the success of each campaign is critical to ensure that you can make modifications if one is not as successful as you would have liked.
Keep Good Company
If you’re going to aim to link out to other sites and conversely have other sights link to yours, you have to do your research. Sites that are established and have been around for years will carry more clout than those who have just been set up.
Furthermore, the websites that receive more traffic and are considered reputable in the eyes of search engine algorithms are going to help you rank higher than those that are not.
Get Your Content Under Control—And Out There
Focus on quality content. Your website is designed to inform, educate, and convert traffic into paying customers. The quality needs to be there. Keywords should be present, but not stuffed to the point that people cannot make sense out of the message. Educate your consumer to become an authority within your niche and that will help you boost sales.
Engage within social media, as there are search engine algorithms that use social media markers to rank websites. Remember that YouTube is owned by Google, therefore having a YouTube channel can be advantageous.
Another good SEO practice is to include multiple forms of content on your website, including a healthy combination of video, text, and images. You will want to use the meta data within each of these in order to help with the search engine ranking and to tell the spiders what is actually found on your site.
On-page and off-page optimization is critical, and when you take advantage of a well thought-out SEO strategy, you can become more visible within search engine results and boost the amount of traffic. That means more potential for sales, and that’s always a great thing.
