What’s more important than your business’ reputation?
Nothing. Without a good reputation, your brand goes down the drain.
In order to stay afloat, you need to be consistent with building your reputation. But if you want to do more than float, you need an excellent strategy for your SEO campaign. Don’t already have one? Then you’ve got some catching up to do.
You can almost guarantee your competitors already have one. By now, you should know how important it is to have an online presence. With an SEO campaign, you can better control how your business is perceived by prospects and customers.
What SEO does for your business is put it on the virtual map. 51 percent of Americans are shopping online. This means search engines are being used to find businesses, services and products.
In fact, 80% of consumers are using local search to find companies. If your business operates locally, then this makes it even more essential to have a solid SEO campaign in place.
If you’re wondering how you can amp up your SEO campaign, you can use the following info and tips to get your ducks in a row.
1. Stay on Top of Google’s Ever-Changing Algorithms
You won’t get very far if your SEO campaign gets your website penalized by Google. As of 2017, Google has a 93% share of all internet search queries. That’s a pretty big market share to not care about its algorithms.
If your website isn’t ranking well on Google, you can be sure your incoming traffic is going to suffer.
The first thing to understand is that Google’s top priority is to provide users with the quickest and most relevant search results. So its algorithm is constantly changing to ensure this.
Since online marketers are always finding loopholes to boost their SEO campaigns, Google has to stay on top of weeding out the nonsense.
To date, Google has done a pretty good job at pushing the best content to the first page of Google. This is in part due to major updates like Panda and Penguin in 2011 and 2012.
These updates wiped out thousands of websites from the first page of Google. The tactics they were using in their SEO campaign were “blackhat” and so they were penalized. Bouncing back after a penalty is very difficult.
This is why you need to think ahead and stay on top of the frequent changes being made, so you don’t end up with the short end of the Google stick.
2. Start Your SEO Campaign ASAP
Your relationship with Google is like a bottle of wine – it gets better with age. So the longer you have your website ranked on Google, the better.
Of course, you need to be consistent with your content and it absolutely must be high-quality. If you’re doing that, then you’ll earn brownie points from the search engine giant.
Don’t get it confused – the date you purchase your domain doesn’t matter. If you purchased the domain and didn’t write anything on it for two years, this won’t help.
Once you start publishing great content, then your relationship building begins. Having a dormant website can actually work against your SEO campaign.
3. Build Your Authority Using High-Quality Content
Speaking of high-quality content, it’s absolutely essential to have to grow your traffic. People aren’t going to come to a site with poor quality posts.
Google has a reputation to maintain. It has surpassed all of the other search engines – Yahoo and Bing – and it plans to maintain its king (or queen) status. This means pushing down sites with poorly written, irrelevant content.
It knows no one wants to read this. Just look at Google Analytics. This tracks all of your traffic, from how many people enter your site and where they go from there. If you’re seeing people bounce away from your site within seconds, then that’s a bad sign.
This can really hurt your SEO campaign, and something needs to be done. If the content isn’t relevant to the audience clicking on your link, then you need to either change your content or your strategy. Maybe you need to promote to a different audience or on another platform.
When you master creating great quality content, the authority of your brand will increase. Brands that are seen as an authority in their respective industries fare better revenue-wise. The key is to publish content that helps your audience solve problems.
Offer up advice, explain how to do something or show how your product can resolve their most pressing issues, and you’re in the money. Your authoritativeness will shoot through the roof, turning you from an unknown brand to a trusted brand.
4. Market Your Content Like Crazy
Don’t just post content on your business blog and expect people to find it. Even if they do, what are the chances of it being the right people? You can gain a lot of traffic from around the world, but if it’s not the audience that actually needs your business, then it’s all pointless.
All the content your creating is “anchor content.” It’s supposed to help drive traffic to your business website, so prospects can browse around and eventually convert into paying customers.
This is why it’s recommended that your content is high-value. But what will make your anchor content work is consistent promotion. As a rule of thumb, you should be promoting more than you’re writing.
You can use a multitude of sites to help share links to your content. This includes authority sites like LinkedIn, Reddit, WiseLike, Quora and a variety of others.
You can share your post on these sites by first writing something of value and then including a link back to the piece. You don’t want to come off spammy, so make sure you’re contributing to the community, rather than just engaging in self-promotion.
You can do this in three simple steps:
1. Create an article that’s unique using a primary keyword.
2. Now, create another piece of content that is relevant to both your business and the audience of the audience to be posted on a third-party site. Make sure it also uses the same primary keyword.
3. Place a link to your content in that piece to drive traffic to your website.
This is a form of link building, which is very important for your SEO campaign.
5. Do Keyword Research Regularly
The primary and secondary keywords being used in your content should be researched using tools like Google keyword planner. This tool will allow you to assess which search terms are the most popular.
You can type in different search queries to see how many people are using them per month. It also reveals how many competitors are using these same keywords in their campaigns. If there’s a lot of competition and you have yet to rank for the term, then it’s best to find something else.
The goal is to find keywords and key phrases that get a lot of hits, but not a lot of competition. This way, you’re getting the best of both worlds – more traffic and easier rankings in Google.
Now, don’t get too comfortable with the keywords you’re using. What ranks well this year may not rank well the next. Keep an eye on how people are finding your site and what search terms they’re using.
If needed, you should switch the keywords you’re using right away to ensure you’re being found by your audience.
6. Grow Your Backlink Library
A backlink is a link to your site that’s placed on another external website. Much like what we discussed in the marketing your content section. Backlinks are the lifeblood of your SEO campaign.
They will help draw in bigger crowds to your website in a short period of time. For instance, say you’re a video game developer. If you can have an article published on popular gaming sites like IGN, then you can potentially get a portion of the traffic.
Sites like these get millions of unique views daily. This is why it’s important to have a link in the article pointing back to your website.
Now, the key is to have these guest posts published on sites that are high-quality, high-authority and relevant. If it doesn’t have all three of these characteristics, then it could hurt your SEO campaign.
The more third-party sites you have unique content published to, the better. This is how you grow your backlink library. When Google sees your link on trusted websites, it will help drive up your ranking.
But before you start building backlinks for your website, make sure it’s prepared for the incoming traffic.
7. Improve Your Page Speed
This is an important factor in ensuring your site is ready for traffic. If your web pages are loading very slowly, expect people to bounce away. And remember – when your bounce rate is high, then it sends a red flag to Google.
It will think something is wrong with your site and will negatively impact your rankings. There are a few ways you can improve the download speed of your web pages. For one, you can lighten the load by removing unnecessary graphics.
But first things first – check your website load speed to see if changes need to be made. Once you’ve found your site isn’t loading quickly, you can either pinpoint the design factors to remove.
Or you can hire a web developer to do it for you. It also wouldn’t hurt to buy hosting from a place with the capacity to handle large traffic volumes. This way, when you site increases in traffic, it doesn’t crash.
8. Don’t Ignore Mobile and AMP
This is the worst thing you could do at this point. Especially since Google places so much emphasis on mobile users. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s going to be penalized in the search engine page rankings.
Now, this doesn’t mean you have to go all out with a separate mobile website. In fact, that is a horrible idea and a waste of time and money. Instead, you should invest in a responsive web design. This will enable users from any device to view and navigate your website.
If you still need some convincing, this stat may push you over the edge – 80% of internet users are on smartphones. That’s a large chunk of people on mobile devices.
So if your site can’t be accessed by these consumers, then you’re losing money at the gate. You can be sure they’re going to end up on a competitor’s website instead.
Then there’s AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is a project recently launched by Google. AMP has its own HTML, which helps improve mobile performance.
You can implement this into your site to improve the mobile user experience, as well as your Google ranking.
9. Create Visual Content and Videos
Today’s consumers are eating up content that is highly visual. If you’re still publishing primarily text-based content, then your SEO campaign isn’t living up to its full potential.
People like content that’s riddled with imagery or that’s published in video form. Hours upon hours of video content is watched every single day. Analyze your audience to see how much video content they’re consuming.
And whether these videos are entertainment or educational. If the latter, then you should consider publishing tutorials, how-tos and other informational videos geared towards your audience.
These can be published on your website, social media sites, and even on YouTube. If you have a lot of video content, you can create your own channel on YouTube.
Other forms of visual content include infographics. This is a clever way to educate your audience and entertain them at the same time.
10. Use Social Media to Its Full Potential
Many businesses still overlook the power of social media.
Google has ties with various platforms, just look at the search results. You can now find Twitter feeds and YouTube videos at the top of the search results.
If you’re not already on YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other popular sites, then it’s time for a change. Social media is an essential part of every SEO campaign.
You can use it to grow your following and engage with your audience. It’s an awesome learning tool if you pay attention. Users are going to social media to talk about brands, products and services.
Get involved in the conversations to see how you can improve your marketing or even your business model. You can even go as far as to start conversations to keep your audience engaged.
Don’t forget to boost your posts using ads. Facebook, Pinterest and other platforms now offer the option to promote your posts for a fee. Like Google Adwords, you can set a daily budget, so you can manage your ad spend.
It’s Time for a Change
Top Spot is the place to go when you need to improve your SEO campaign. We offer a variety of services, which include web development and online marketing – both local and global.
If your search engine rankings are low and your traffic is scarce, we can help. Contact us today to consult with our experts about improving your web presence.
