Now, more than ever, brands and content creators are striving to build an online presence. Gone are the days where people only relied on referrals from friends. To be a successful business you have to have the right tools.
Enter: search engine optimization. When used, SEO not only increases your brand’s awareness and visibility, but helps to measure and achieve engagement. Are you ready to reach and influence your audiences? You’re in the right place.
What is Seo
Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, involves implementing marketing strategies to increase your website traffic. People, all over the world—especially your audiences—are searching for things. But without the right optimization for your website or social media channel, they won’t find the information they’re looking for. Or worse, they won’t subscribe to your newsletters, purchase your products, or refer friends to your site.
How SEO Works for Websites
So, you’re ready to optimize your website—great! Let’s first discuss how search engine optimization works for websites, whether you’re doing content (such as B2C) for a business or yourself.
When a person searches for anything search engines (Google, for instance) crawl the internet and post the most relevant content. Think about the last time you searched for something, remember clicking on the first page of the results? Well, that’s where you want your content to land.
1. Keyword Research
So, how does one land on the very first page of Google? Well, the first thing any business, digital marketer, or content creator should do is: keyword research. Simply put, this strategy involves searching for and analyzing common searched terms related to your topic.
We suggest doing keyword research for each article to ensure that keywords are relevant to each specific piece of content. We’d also suggest using a free resource such as Google Trends while searching for frequently used keywords and search queries.
After you’ve gathered commonly searched keywords, it’s a great idea to decide how and where you are going to place them in your content.
For illustrative purposes, let’s say you’re writing an article on the best sustainable water bottles. You searched common terms and found that: eco-friendly, green, recycled materials, independent brands, environmentally conscious, and family are the most searched and relate to your topic.
So, these are keywords that you should use throughout your post. To make things a little easier, we’ve compiled a list of where these keywords should go to optimize your content:
- Headings (article title)
- Subheadings (H2, H3)
- Meta description
- Copy (the main article or blog post)
- URL
2. Write Engaging Copy
Now that you’ve completed keyword research—it’s time to start thinking about and writing engaging content. Experts suggest, content, often found on landing pages, should aim to include various forms of media and call to actions to successfully deliver information. This not only optimizes your website but increases audience engagement which ultimately generates leads.
Here are some other ways to ensure your digital content is optimized for your audience:
- Keep copy concise (avoid wordy sentences or phrases)
- Be sure that content is accessible and easily viewed for mobile readers
- Ensure that pages are loaded at a fast rate
- Include inbound and outbound links
- Consider using A/B testing to ensure website is user-friendly
SEo and social media platforms
Although search engine optimization was initially a strategy for websites—it’s now widely used for social media content. Remember the last time you were on Instagram, and you viewed an ad for one of your favorite brands? Well, that means that the brand did its job and optimized content to reach it’s intended consumer: you.
So, how will you achieve the same results? Experts suggest, incorporating keywords (from keyword research) into your posts will help reach intended audiences.
You can also optimize your social media accounts by:
- Including a link to your website on your social media accounts
- Consider adding inbound links to increase engagement
- Incorporate UGC (user-generated content) in social media posts to build brand awareness
- Engage with followers to establish credibility and increase shares
measuring analytics
So, you’ve done the keyword research, wrote engaging copy and made sure that your social media accounts were also optimized—now what? It’s time to measure how well you used search engine optimization.
Here’s what to look for and how to do it:
1.Traffic
Organic traffic is truly the end goal for any business’s online presence. It’s the number of visitors you get by people searching your content.
You don’t have to rely on paid advertisements or spend a lot of time “spreading the word”. Your SEO techniques (because you’ll be a pro in no time) will help you increase visitors.
The best applications to track organic traffic:
2. Bounce Rate
Once visitors are on your website, you want to make sure they stay on your site. Experts suggest, bounce rates indicate how many people came onto your website and left. A good bounce rate should be approximately between 26 and 70 percent. You can track your site’s bounce rate on Google Analytics.
3. Click-through rate
The click-through rate, which is often tracked by companies, shows you: how many visitors actually clicked your link from the search results. This is where good SEO comes in, because if your website is optimized, you use highly searched keywords, and are highly ranked in search queries your click-through rate will reflect that.
4. Engagement Rate
The goal is to get visitors to your website and interact with your content—this is where engagement rate plays a major role. Engagement rate is often measured by: audiences’ average visit duration, pages visited during each browsing session, and bounce rate.
If your visitors aren’t spending a lot of time on your website or clicking links, it’s time to reference our resources to ensure that you’ve used the best SEO practices.
We know that starting a business, maintaining a website, and generating leads can seem like a daunting task. But with this article and our free monthly newsletter we know that you’ll be gaining online visibility in no time! Are you ready to propel your online business?
