If you’re a startup owner, or you plan on running your own small business, you’re probably planning how to beef up your internet marketing efforts. These are initiatives that will get your business found online, particularly through search engine optimization or SEO.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-man team or have a handful of employees already, you can control your online presence by applying SEO. However, to produce positive results, you have to put in the work, and make sure to only implement the best practices, which will be discussed below.
So what is SEO and why is it important?
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of tuning your website so that it’s easy for search engines like Google to crawl and index it the way you want it to. The best SEO strategies will allow you to rank high on results pages for queries that are relevant to your website.
This is important because consumers are now online. There are approximately 4.66 billion internet users around the world, and 4.32 billion of those are also mobile users. On average, Google, the largest search engine in the world, receives 5.5 billion searches a day. It’s easy to see where the users are just from looking at those numbers alone.
The question is, how are you going to get them to notice your website? How are you going to lead them from search engines to a landing page? This is where SEO comes in, and it starts with an audit. What’s an SEO audit? It’s a process that determines the foundational issues that affect your online presence, allowing you to come up with an effective plan.
Below are three best practices that will help boost your SEO strategy, helping your website in its lead generation and conversion efforts.
1. On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing on-page content. These include all elements that can be found on your actual website.
For starters, these elements are title tags, meta tags or meta descriptions, URL or slugs, content, and image alt texts. By optimizing these, you’re not only giving your visitors a good user experience, but you’re also making it easy for Google bots or Google crawlers to understand what your website is all about. Make sure to define all of them in a way that will make it easy for Google to understand.
Next, you should optimize your content. Keyword research is an important part of SEO. You have to target keywords that align with what your target audience is looking for, and also, keeping in mind their intention behind those searches. For example, if a user searches for “black running shoes on sale”, then you’re sure that the user has the intention of purchasing some running shoes. Meanwhile, if they enter a query with the words “good hiking shoes”, then you know that they’re doing research on shoes for hiking.
Choose relevant keywords that you want your business to be associated with. It must be both unique, and competitive, then naturally sprinkle it throughout the content on your website. This also improves the page authority. Be careful of keyword stuffing. Spammy use of keywords is against Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines and could lead to serious penalties.
2. Optimize for Local Searches
Local search is important if your business is targeting a specific area or your local audience. One example would be for people looking for housing options in a specific location. Another one would be if you’re a business operating in a specific location and targeting locals in that area. A mortgage company in Colorado would benefit from a strategy using keywords, like “colorado mortgage company ” or “colorado’s best mortgage lender.”
You will appear on top searches if your site is optimized for those local keywords. Also, your chances of getting new business may increase. If you need more guidance on how to optimize for local searches then make sure to contact an SEO consultant who can help you take safe directions.
Also, read: 7 Outstanding Tips To Promote Your Brand On Instagram And Generate Sales
3. Link Building
As a business owner, you want to establish your authority online. When someone enters a search query, for example, “best italian restaurant in new york” and your business shows up for this generic but highly used keyword, then you’re already seen as a dominant player in the game.
You need to establish authority and one effective way to do this is through link building. This is the process of having other reputable and credible websites link back to pages or content on your own website. The idea here is that these trustworthy websites are linking back to your site because they see it as a relevant and informative source of data as well.
A common link building practice is guest blogging. This is the method of writing an article for a third party website, imparting your knowledge about a topic that’s relevant to your business and the prospective site. The article is posted on the third-party website with a link that a user can click, so they’re then transported to a particular page on your site. You normally put the link of a page that you want to rank. This is a common practice that takes a lot of work.
Link building is an initiative that mostly impacts awareness and authority. Making a sale isn’t really the main goal of this SEO initiative, but it has a compound effect on sales if done correctly.
Always make sure to reach out to sites that are reputable, and credible. Also, always share articles that readers will find informative.
Give Your Business an SEO Boost
There are a lot of SEO techniques that can help boost your startup’s growth and ranking. The ones listed above will help kick start your journey into startup success.
One more thing to remember is that SEO isn’t magic. It’s not a technique that will sprout results overnight. It’s a strategy that needs to be modified and analyzed frequently to get the best results. When done correctly, it’s a long-term initiative that can mean exponential growth for your startup.