By Zoe Simon, Guest Blog Post
With so much content from businesses saturating the online world, it can be challenging to stand out. Digital marketing strategies have become essential for companies to make their products and services known to audiences to boost sales and traction. One of these is SEO, which has been shown to bring long-term benefits to those who integrate it into their marketing practices. However, 47% of small businesses have yet to employ SEO strategies; despite acknowledging its advantages, many are concerned about its intricacy or the lack of immediate results.
You might be considering SEO for your business but are worried about its complexity or costs. Fortunately, SEO doesn’t have to be complicated, and there are many strategies you can use to drive sales. Continue reading for a guide on SEO, the best tactics to use, and which to avoid.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a set of practices that aims to improve your website’s visibility on search engines and build organic traffic to your website. Search results are the easiest way for people to discover and access your business. SEO can help you rank higher on the search engine results page, which means more people will find your products and services. Practices include identifying relevant keywords, creating and optimizing high-quality and usable content, including links from credible or high-authority sites and sources, and more.
Entrepreneur explains that SEO has four main pillars: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO. On-page SEO refers to the content on your website or page, which should be relevant to customer search queries to ensure high rankings. Off-page SEO helps optimize your search presence, usually through backlinks, which are links to your page hosted on other websites. Technical SEO concerns the movement of users and search bots through your web pages, which should be easy to navigate for better credibility. If you want to be found on more localized searches, Local SEO helps you get more traction with location-based searches that can benefit your physical store.
SEO marketing practices to avoid
•Black Hat SEO
Some businesses use unethical methods to boost ranking quickly; these tactics are known as Black Hat SEO. These systems often use keyword stuffing—filling content or advertisements with irrelevant keywords—to get their website on the front of the search engine results page through manipulation. A piece on fake advertisements from Ayima notes how these posts are incredibly easy to create, even with a low entry budget. They are unfortunately quite effective, with 15% of people having fallen victim to a scam advert and reported it. Fake posts and ads manipulated to get higher rankings on search engines can also harm the clickthrough rates of honest and credible content and affect your ranking.
•Writing for search engines
Many search engines will have SEO guidelines to help you achieve better rankings. Still, it can be easy to get swept up with a particular aspect of SEO that you lose relevance and connection to your audience. You could be focusing heavily on keyword research or website navigation, and end up spending less time creating engaging and informative content for people. Poor quality and inauthentic content could cost you business opportunities and reduce your business’s credibility.
•Content spinning
Plagiarism is a big no-no for almost any situation, including for SEO content. Because it’s difficult to create original content regarding a popular niche or topic, some digital marketers use content spinning, which involves creating multiple or duplicate versions of the same post and only swapping out a few words or sentences to avoid plagiarism detection. While this method does make writing and publishing articles and posts faster, it can harm your SEO if Google penalizes you for plagiarized content.
Good SEO practices business can implement
• Create good content
Other than optimizing your pages or using your posts for incorporating keywords, creating quality content is one of the best ways to boost SEO, improve sales, and gain customer trust organically and naturally. Customers trust brands that produce authentic, relevant, and engaging content, and more of that can help improve your rankings.
•Optimize for mobile
Many people are using their phones for searching, shopping, and visiting websites, so you need to work on your website’s compatibility with mobile devices. Ensure that text and photos can be viewed clearly, and that all links and buttons work. People who have a pleasant experience with your website will likely visit again. Easy navigation also helps boost credibility with search bots, which can also improve your site’s ranking.
•Leverage social media
Social media doesn’t directly boost your rankings, but tapping into a bigger audience on social media can help drive traffic to your site. Our post “Social Media Marketing in Business” highlights that effective social media is measurable through reach. You can use the views, clicks, and reactions to your posts to gauge how people perceive your business. This data allows you to customize your approach, improve your website and content to attract more followers or customers, and translate that into sales.
content intended only for the use of human-incubator.com By Zoe Simon
