Today, most of the businesses have jumped into online mode, wherein most of the profit is gained. Majority of the customers prefer online shopping, be it buying a product or availing a service. It is necessary to attract more customers and stay ahead of the competitors, for a business to run successfully. When a customer types a keyword related to your product or service description, he automatically clicks on to the website, which is placed top in the search results. Imagine what would happen if your business website isn’t placed on top of the list? You will start losing customers, and as a result, your business growth becomes questionable.
Search engines are answer machines which navigate through the entire content on the internet, scrutinize them by a process called ‘ crawling and indexing’ and then rank the content based on how well the content matches with the query sequence or the array of strings typed by the user. While we cannot deny the fact that search engines make money through advertising, the paid advertisements, social media, and other online platforms can direct traffic away from the websites. However, various studies have shown that people find organic search results more credible and reliable compared to the paid advertisements.
What is SEO?
SEO is the acronym of Search Engine Optimization, which is a collection of tools that help in increasing the website traffic both qualitatively and quantitatively, through non-paid search engine results. SEO identifies the intent of the users and delivers it in such a way that your website gets identified by the search engine crawlers. It is found that SEO marketing strategy has about 20 times more traffic opportunity than internet advertising models like Pay per click. It is the only online marketing channel which helps you pay dividends over time. When you provide a solid content that is worth ranking your website with the right keywords, your traffic can increase over time whereas; you need to continuously pay to direct the traffic to your website in the case of paid advertisements.
Why Every Business needs SEO?
- SEO pulls traffic to your website without the need for advertisements
- It has better conversion rates when compared to other sources
- It increases the sales of your company.
- It increases website traffic without you paying per click and advertising your website.
- It promotes your website round the clock anytime any day.
- While it may take time to place your website in the optimal rankings, there is no going down once you are ranked. It is a long term strategy for marketing your website.
- It improves the reputation and quality of your brand.
- People may start referring your website to their circles as a result of efficient SEO marketing strategy.
- It is relatively affordable than paid advertising.
- By being the first website in the search results, your market share will increase dramatically.
- It indirectly influences your sales offline.
- It improves the speed and enhances the security of your website
- It helps you gain new customers, thereby expanding your customer base.
- It integrates all your online marketing activities like web design, content marketing, and social media marketing.
SEO Marketing strategies
Since search engine algorithms rapidly change with the evolution of Web, it is necessary to keep your website content constantly updated in order to sustain in the optimal rankings of search engine results.
Some of the key SEO marketing strategies by experts are:
1. Content marketing: Creating the right content is not only the way to rank your keywords but also the way to increase positive user response. Content is always the King. Following are the ways to improvise your content:
Keywords: By identifying the targeted keywords that drive traffic to your website and scrutinizing the ways in which the keywords can be put such that the words are less competitive, you can brainstorm for the potential keywords that will place your website in the optimal search rankings.
Meta tags: Meta tags are invisible tags that are used by search engines and website users to give a brief description of your page. Meta tags help in determining the type of your website content and thus, it is necessary to provide quality meta tags to ensure you are the first.
Backlinks: When you create quality blog posts or articles that trend over the internet, other bloggers and web content writers may start adding your website link to their posts as a backlink. It is not about how many backlinks your website has that matters; it is about the quality links you have pointing back to your website that matters. These natural backlinks enhance your website rankings for all the major keywords.
Product images: Images play a key role in the visual judgment of your product by the customer or website user. A quality product image helps drive traffic to your site more as lots of website users track websites through image results rather than web results in search engines like Google.
Social media: Although social media has no direct relation in increasing the website rankings, the number of shares of your post or website on social media connects more people to view your web content, thereby attracting more traffic.
2. Website structure planning: How you organize your website and how you structure it plays a key role in directing better traffic. Users find well-structured websites as more helpful and easy to navigate. Well-structured websites also help search engines to index your website URLs better. Besides this, the indexability of your website is essential to determine the SEO marketing strategy of your website for search engines. All the efforts taken to create better web content go down the drain if the search engine crawlers cannot crawl through your page.
3. Creating new landing pages: Every page indexed by a search engine is considered as a landing page. Creating multiple landing pages describing your multiple products and services helps in targeting more keywords, as a result, drives more traffic to your site. Maintaining an optimal code-to-text ratio is an important factor in SEO Marketing strategy.
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