Today, traditional and conventional advertising methods just do not cut it anymore.
The internet and the advent of the digital age have made sure of that. In this modern time and age, the internet has spurred the evolution of marketing and advertising techniques. Back then, businesses and entrepreneurs relied on television commercials, newspaper ads, and the like to create a buzz about their products and services.
These days, this technique is not only obsolete but can be vastly limiting. Today, businesses and entrepreneurs capitalize on the proven advantages of search engine optimization (SEO for brevity) to promote their products or services. Utilizing SEO gives your business or company an edge as you get to market your goods or services to millions of users.
Unfortunately, too many businesses do not see the merit of utilizing SEO despite its high return on investment. Instead, they opt to rely and settle on paid ads and social media, and while these work, you run the risk of falling behind your competitors who are already reaping the benefits of SEO.
Keep in mind that for SEO to work, you need to put in the time and effort. It is not an overnight endeavor that you can forego once you start ranking. Rather, it is a continuous process that requires work. Once you rank, however, your sales will skyrocket with minimal to no recurring expenses. If the idea of a profitable marketing and advertising method entices you, you might want to hire an SEO expert or a digital marketing agency. If you are still on the fence about SEO’s efficacy, below is a list of SEO strategies that have been proven to work.
That said, these are the strategies that would help you have a better understanding of what works best in SEO.
1.) Improve Traffic and Organic Visibility
One of the benefits SEO does for your business or company website is to improve traffic and organic visibility. An excellent example of this is businesses in the food industries who wish to create a search-friendly website, maximize visibility, improve user experience and increase website visitors should utilize SEO techniques. SEO strategies that guarantee results are to develop an integrated site-wide keyword strategy and uncover user intent and organize your website’s content. On top of that, creating a URL strategy to take advantage of established value and do SEO monitoring to fix issues post website launch will be incredibly beneficial.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
a.) If you wish to improve your visitor experience and SEO, your website needs to have good architecture and content development.
b.) For SEO to work, you need to do routine website maintenance as well. That said, the SEO-first approach should be complemented by routine website maintenance.
c.) A good URL strategy is good for SEO, user experience. It is also ideal for boosting current marketing incentives
2.) Driving Traffic To A Localized Website
An industry that can significantly benefit from this strategy is the hotel sector. If your incentives are to increase traffic to a local language website, convert those visits to bookings and organically increase non-brand-related traffic, you need to work on your local SEO strategy. Some of the strategies proven to work are technical audits to optimize websites for non-branded keywords, make changes such as switching to CMS, combine content outreach and social media sharing to increase non-brand traffic. Also, it would help if you routinely published content and shared it on social media for more localized viewers to see and re-share it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
a.) A technical audit is paramount as it improves the overall growth of a website. It is typically done to make a flawless and more search engine-friendly website.
b.) Keeping a steady stream of fresh content is a sure way to keep your community engaged. As a result, you can do more indexing which would redound to a helpful boost in search engine rankings.
3.) Organic Increase in Traffic Through Blogs
Industries in the laboratory sector may want to take a closer look at this strategy. If you wish to create a blog strategy and focus on solving customer concerns to increase qualified traffic, you need to post blogs that would relate well to industry questions. Similarly, it would greatly help if you added a call-to-action on each of your blog posts. Be sure to include all the relevant keywords in the content that your target audience searches for. Finish it all up by promoting these blogs across social media platforms.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
a.) Blogs that are relevant to your website are avenues for you to steer traffic back to your website. In a similar vein, keep in mind that while quality content is king, it would all be for naught if pertinent keywords are not included.
b.) Emphasis must be put on CTA’s as these are unbelievably powerful. Conversions, revenue, business, and even profit rely on it.
c.) Promoting content can be done in a myriad of ways, but if you want your content to reach the right audience easily and quickly, there is no better platform than social media.
4.) Show Up for Keywords Related to Service
With competition rife and aplenty in any industry, standing out requires time and effort. That said, it is quite challenging to show up for keyword searches that may be relevant to your business’s services or features. To address this, you need a detailed keyword search and a thorough technical optimization complemented with recurring audits to pick out new and existing problems your website may have. On top of that, you need to do steady blog publishing and audit your content to find out the keyword rankings of your content. Lastly, an off-site audit is recommended to find out which of your content is noteworthy. This is done to get PR-based articles in place to get a better ranking and increase domain authority.
KEY TAKEAWAY:
a.) Successful SEO campaigns require technical audits (link building, web design, content creation, content distribution, etc.). However, these “front end” endeavors would not work if your “back end” is not optimized. Technical audits require a thorough check on your websites, such as finding and fixing broken links, bolded words, and proper use of the heading tags. Confusing hi-tech terms such as servers, DNS services, web hosting, IP addresses are still within the scope of a good technical back-end audit. That said, you should never overlook this.
b.) One of the best ways to find out what is causing a hindrance in your SEO efforts is to do routine technical optimizations.
c.) One of the best ways to track progress and see whether your efforts are finally taking off is to do recurring audits.
d.) Keyword research is vital. It is done to find out what it is exactly people are searching for on the web. As a result, you can be in the right place and right time with the appropriate content to address their queries. Keep in mind that this is not a do once-and-drop process. It is an ongoing endeavor considering that your competition, as well as the trends, are ever-changing.
e.) While search engines have an affinity for new and fresh content, be sure you can strike a balance between quality and frequency. Do not post just for the sake of posting. Only post when you have something noteworthy to share that may prove beneficial to users.
f.) Content audit is done as a qualitative analysis of ALL the content on your website. In doing so, developing an effective marketing strategy will be quicker and easier. More importantly, content audits are an excellent way of showing you what methods worked and which ones did not.
CONCLUSION
Despite its efficacy, SEO is still considered one of the most misunderstood marketing forms on the internet. That said, it may be easy for digital marketing agencies to overpromise and under-deliver their services to companies who wish to improve their search rankings. At times, these are the agencies that would almost always guarantee you a top ranking.
Sad to say that these agencies are not interested in growing your business. Rather, profit is their primary incentive. As an entrepreneur with sound business acumen, you need to be a little keen on deciding which agency your investment should go to. If you want good results, you need to partner with the right people.
The right agency will have a competent team behind your SEO efforts to get your website ranking in no time.
Image credit: iStockPhoto