Your business is open and ready for customers, but no one s showing up? If you've been wondering how to increase your website traffic, the short answer is PPC ads and SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO is what drives your target audience to your website through search. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the technique of optimizing the amount of visits to your website by ensuring that the site ranks high on the list of search engine results (SERP) given by a search engine.
Whether your company is online-only, brick-and-mortar-only, or a hybrid of both, you need a strong digital presence, including a well-designed, branded website and social media accounts to match. You may increase the visibility of your company in search results by using SEO. Prospects, clients, and customers will be able to find the products and services your company has to offer a lot easier.
Google is the most popular search engine, followed by YouTube, Facebook and even Pinterest.
Google Search Facts
Google users spend an average of 15.27 minutes each day on the site. It's also the most popular website on the planet.
The average click-through rate (CTR) for the top position of organic results in Google Search is 28.5 percent. The CTR for the second and third places is 15.7 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The great majority of searches rarely look past the first few pages, let alone the first few results (the top ten results). So, if your intended keywords and phrases aren't ranking high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you're probably missing out on a lot of business and not being seen at all. Ranking on page 1 for your top Google Search Keywords is your top priority.
What Can Help You Rank Higher in Search
Active Social Media Accounts
Having a social media presence is beneficial to search! You can leverage your social media material to improve your Google ranking. Those social posts, however, must be optimized as well. For greater discoverability, Facebook recently began heavily encouraging the usage of hashtags in posts. So, in a nutshell, Facebook SEO is now a thing!
Keywords are crucial
Keywords are search phrases used to find information on the internet. A single word, two words, or even a phrase can be used as a search query. Knowing what keywords consumers would type into a search engine to find your company is crucial to excellent SEO.
You may already be aware of the most important keywords for your industry. If you don't, you can conduct research using a keyword search tool.
Tools to Rank Higher in Google
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Ads Keyword Planner is the most comprehensive keyword research tool, Google Keyword Planner is useful for determining keyword volume, metrics, and projections. See what people are looking for on YouTube, Amazon, and other sites using a keyword generator.
WordTracker
WordTracker is a great tool for finding new keywords and researching competitors' keywords. You may also conduct a keyword tool search to discover which ones rank higher than others, as well as test new keywords and investigate ones you believe are appropriate for your company.
When your company develops content – such as a blog post on your website – to boost the amount of visitors to your site, knowing the proper keywords is critical. To put it another way, more visitors enhance the likelihood of more sales.
Match Your Audience Search Intent
Google's algorithm has considerably improved over time in order to better determine people's search intent. That is to say, Google is constantly working to enhance the quality of the results that are most relevant to the search phrase. It's vital that the material on your website and blog matches your audience's search intent.
Try to think like your target audience to figure out what they're looking for on Google. Typing in “How to...”, for example, usually indicates that someone wants to learn a skill rather than buy something. When you Google "how to knit socks," you'll find videos and blog postings with innovative ideas and step-by-step instructions for knitting your own socks.
Videos targeting the "how to" search intent could be an effective way to educate people about your expertise and your business if your small business is in the consulting, teaching, or instruction-based sphere.
The search “Where to buy affordable socks,” on the other hand, indicates a more transactional intent, thus the results contain a variety of online retailers with specific product recommendations for purchase, as well as a Google map with nearby stores.
Because the user's objective is to buy, "Where" is a critical term if you have a retail or eCommerce space.
Conduct Competitive Research
Spend some time on Google putting in various business-related search terms and using keyword tools to conduct competition research. You'll find out what keywords are effective for your competition, as well as what keywords will help you stand out. The idea is to figure out what will get your site the most visitors.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media
Because social networking sites are among the most frequented sites on the internet, they play an important role in optimizing SEO. Here are some things to think about for the three most popular social media platforms.
All posts on a Facebook business page are public and so searchable on Google. As I previously stated, Facebook is the world's third most visited website.
First, take a look at your Facebook page to see how you might improve your company's SEO. Make sure you've included keyword-rich descriptions in every field in the About section. You should also use your most important keywords in as many of your posts as possible.
YouTube
YouTube, as the second most popular search engine, is essential for any company that produces video content. Relevant videos are usually found on the first page of search engine results pages.
Make sure to include keywords in the description of your videos, whether you post them or go live on YouTube. You can also use your YouTube channel to repurpose material from other platforms.
Assume you're going to do a Facebook Live video broadcast. Download the replay and upload it to YouTube as a following step. You're ready to launch once you've included a custom thumbnail and a keyword-rich description.
You can also simply repurpose clips from the Facebook Live broadcast. Facebook has a new built-in feature that allows you to cut lengthier movies into segments.
Tweets frequently appear at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages if your Twitter account isn't secured. So, if you're on Twitter, make sure to include your main keywords as well as a few hashtags in your tweets. This is all completely free SEO for your company.
Pinterest is a great way to visually display your products and promote your brand. Having a link back from Pinterest to your products is a great way to expand your brand and assist with your SEO. This works great for Etsy sellers, Shopify and e-commerce retailers.
Best Practices for SEO-Friendly Content
Long-form content (3,000 words or more) receives 3x the amount of traffic, 4x the number of shares, and 3.5x the number of backlinks as articles of medium length (901-1200 words). Create cornerstone content and work out from there.
Make engaging meta descriptions and title tags. This may appear to be difficult, but it is not. You can use title tags and meta descriptions to add more keywords to your article. Meta descriptions are short summaries that help web sites find your page. A title tag is a keyword-rich headline, and meta descriptions are short summaries that help web sites locate your page. Both the search intent and the target keywords should be included. Furthermore, your title should be descriptive, and your meta description should be precise and action-oriented.
Make sure your photos are optimized, compressed, and include alt tags. Photo captions are also searched for keywords by search engines, so include text – alt tags – for your creative parts. Jpegs are ideal for text-rich photographs, whereas pngs are excellent for text-rich graphics.
Important side note: because larger image files take longer to load on a website, compress your photographs or save as a JPG before uploading them.
For easy SEO optimization, add a custom tool/plugin to your website. There are numerous similar tools available. Yoast is one of the most popular for Wordpress sites.
Conclusion
Improving your SEO is a simple way to make your company more noticeable online. It may not happen right away, but it will certainly happen over time if you follow the advice in this article.
Just make sure your keywords are relevant to your industry and that you have quality content to back them up.
Need SEO help? Our team is here to assist! We can build full strategy SEO campaigns that work. Looking for a faster way to get results? We can help there, too! Learn more about us or Get in touch today