Many business owners may find that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is too complex to implement into their business’ marketing efforts. However, understanding the basics of SEO can enhance your business’ online presence and hopefully lead to increased sales for your business.
So, what exactly is SEO? Search engine optimization is an effective digital marketing strategy that helps improve your website’s visibility in organic search rankings.Having a website rank well in search rankings can ultimately lead to an increase in visitors and conversions. To achieve higher search rankings, there are on-page and off-page optimizations that can be made to make your website more visible. Here are 6 SEO basics best practices for business owners!
1. Define and Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in developing a good SEO strategy is to define your target audience. Your target audience is who your product and/or service is trying to reach. As a business owner, you should have a good understanding of the type of audiences that will need your offering. By identifying and locating potential customers, you can optimize your website and content to fit their needs. Having targeted messaging and optimizations will attract the visitors that are more likely to engage with your business. A few considerations to narrow down your target audience may include:
Consumer Demographics
Using Company’s Social Media Insights
Research Competitors
2. Keyword Research and Implementation
At its core, SEO is driven off keywords and related content on your website. It helps the search engine crawlers to identify the products and services that you have to offer on the website. Once the target audience has been identified, researching and implementing relevant keywords on your website allows customers to locate your product or service via searches. Keyword implementing can be applied to meta tags and on-page content throughout your website. You’ll want to insert keywords into relevant content where it makes the most sense for your target audience. While implementing keywords, you want to avoid keyword stuffing - which is unnecessary repetition of your keyword with the intent to improve search engine rankings. This is an ineffective tactic and usually defined as a bad SEO best practice.
3. Content is King
Generating quality content is a vital part of SEO and is one of the top factors for helping your website rank well in search engines. Content should be consistent, of quality, engaging and informative for your audience. Diversifying your content on various topics and relevance to your page is a best practice for SEO. Some ideas for quality content types may include:
Testimonials
Blog posts
Before/after photos
Tutorials
Infographics
Podcasts
Videos
4. Establish your Authority with Backlinks
A website that shares a hyperlink to another website is called a backlink. Backlinks typically help SEO efforts because they help establish credibility between websites. Think of backlinks as almost like a stamp of approval from highly rated organizations. This credibility is called , meaning the importance given to a webpage within a specific search query. Having multiple backlinks for websites that are ranking well will help rank your website higher organically. Other websites that link to your content can encourage higher traffic to your website and build up your online rapport. One way to encourage others to link your content is through sharing diversified, quality content as discussed above.
5. On-Page Optimizations
To achieve higher search engine rankings through SEO, there are various on-page optimizations that can be applied to the various pages and overall on your website. Applying these optimizations will allow for the search engine crawlers to identify various components of your website so that it can determine how to rank your pages and your website overall. Here are a few of the most popular on-page optimizations that can happen on your website.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are bits of information that signal to search engines what your content is about. The three types of Meta tags that are most important to business owners are the meta description, meta title, and header. We’ll break down each of these.
The meta description describes your content in concise phrases that should inform and interest your readers. This section also provides search engines a short summary about the web page content. The meta description helps users get a general understanding of what the page is about in the search results.
Page titles, often called the meta title, is essentially a name tag for a particular web page. Page titles are usually the first descriptive element of a page in search results. The meta title helps crawlability with search engines, but also identifies the general theme of what the page is about.
Headers are an excellent method to organize and break up content to help with user readability on specific pages. Headers are helpful for search engines to index and identify your topics within the content.
H1- Headline: Only use one H1. H2- Subsection to separate content into smaller sections. Sub-subsection breaks subsection into condensed section.
6. Internal Linking
Interlinking another best practice for a successful SEO strategy. This best practice involves hyperlinking text from a page and linking it to another page on your site. Interlinking is effective for user experience as it allows users to navigate from one page to another quickly. Interlinking is another valuable component for SEO because it makes it easy for search engines to index your website more effectively and efficiently through their crawling method.
How Can I Get Started with SEO?
Although SEO can be complicated and technical, there are basic best practices that all business owners should understand before you work with a digital marketing agency or try to implement a SEO strategy yourself. Having a foundational understanding of SEO allows you to be more prepared as a business owner managing your digital marketing efforts.
If you have any questions or would like to schedule a free SEO audit, please contact us