WHY SEO IS THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR ANY BUSINESS
Why SEO is the right choice for any business is a question many companies find themselves asking as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Perhaps as recently as ten years ago you could get by with promoting yourself just through the local paper ads and word of mouth. But in today’s world, where everybody is using some sort of gadget to surf the net to find anything they might need, your business doesn't stand a chance against the competition if you don't employ at least the essential tactics for branding and marketing yourself online.
And simply putting together a website won't cut it - after all, what's it good for, if nobody sees it? You need a way to reach the people that are going online looking for what you have to offer; that’s just business – get in front of people who want what you have to offer.
Why SEO Should Be Considered in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When considering your online strategy it is important to ask yourself - Do I need to run an SEO campaign? After all organic SEO is not a quick fix that you buy and hope to get to the top of the search engine listings immediately and then move onto the next marketing strategy. It is, however, a way of getting you noticed with Google and all the other major search engines. This is where your customers are searching for products and services online. SEO can be run as a stand alone marketing tool or can be integrated within the bigger picture of your overall online marketing strategy.
SEO Is a Long-Term Investment
As mentioned organic Google top rank listing doesn’t happen immediately and requires a certain amount of tweaking during the months of your campaign. I would recommend at least 3 – 6 months to achieve a successful Search Engine Optimisation campaign. This will enable you to analyse, monitor and control progress effectively to provide the best search results. By using any analytic SEO reporting tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs will help you monitor progress and see what keywords are most effective and those keywords that aren’t. This is all part of the strategy which is why it needs to be ongoing.
Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis
First of all keyword research and competitive analysis are vital to ensure that proper keyword phrases are being to chosen to ensure best targeting for those visitors seeking your products or services online. This means that if you are an Italian Restaurant in London then you need to concentrate on phrases your customers will type into the search engines such as “restaurants in London”.
You need to be realistic about the competition and specifically look at how well your competitors are doing in the search engine results pages (SERPS). This will provide you with enough information to decide on what the best keywords should be used for your campaign. You can then decide how effective those keywords will be when you get to the top of the search engines. There is no point spending a lot of money getting to page 1 if no-one is searching for your chosen phrases. Keyword and competitive analysis are singularly the most important activities your SEO team will undertake before they begin your SEO campaign.
Website Optimisation and Technical Foundations
Once you have decided on the best keywords to use then it is a case of optimising your website’s code. This means looking at content, user experience, title tags, meta descriptions, internal linking, and other technical elements. With Google’s ever changing algorithms in determining what websites are important enough for page 1 listings this is becoming more and more important nowadays. It is not just about building links, it is also about how well search engines can crawl your website; for example, technical performance and whether the metadata is correctly implemented. If you have a poorly optimised website then it will take a lot more link building to get you to the top. So it pays to optimise the code as best as possible.
The Importance of Homepage Optimisation
Remember the home page is fundamental and is key to Google’s robots finding your website easily as this is the first place that they look. By optimising the home page properly can help generate great search results that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This not only provides a way of Google finding you easily but will also help tell Google about the rest of the website through internal linking.
Using Sitemaps to Improve Indexing
Other useful tools such as sitemaps will help tell Google about other pages in the website especially those pages that you are optimising. In the sitemaps it is good to set the priority on a handful of pages as this can negate itself if priorities are set on too many pages. This is a very handy tip because Google is constantly looking for important pages that it thinks it should be displaying.
Page Ranking and Authority Signals
The next important aspect to SEO is to look at page ranking. This indicates how important your website is in the eyes of Google in terms of length of time it is live and also how many good quality back links it has. Page ranking is Google’s vote of confidence for a website starting at the lowest 0 and then going up to the highest being 10.
Off-Page SEO and Link Building
Any SEO campaign generally wouldn’t be enough just by following an onsite strategy especially true for the more competitive websites. To help improve your ranking in the search results pages will require manual link building back to your website. This is an ongoing process that can take months and is the reason why organic SEO can take to long. The length of time can be determined by how competitive the search terms are in the first place. The less competitive, then the less time will need to be spent link building. The more competitive however will mean that more time will need to be spent link building to improve ranking.
The quality of links is necessary as Google pays special attention to the importance of relevant links to your website, so beware and don’t get fooled into thinking that buying thousands of links is going to help you, because it won’t. Why because Google will only be looking at links that have a high ranking (relevant). It is also important to remember that attempting to manipulate rankings through artificial link building can result in penalties. This is rare but does happen. Link building is time-consuming because it requires a careful and considered approach. It is this careful and slow process that ensures the best possible link building strategy is adhered to all the time.
The Value of SEO in Online Marketing
Whatever your choice of online marketing nothing changes the fact that most (if not all) your customers searching your products and services go through Google or one of the other main search engines first. Ranking at the top of search engine results pages for relevant keywords means that you are more visible to your customers. This is probably the most valuable marketing tool any business should invest in.
Employ Professional SEO
The important thing to remember is that in order to have a successful SEO campaign, you should employ a professional SEO company to do the work – you need people with experience to help you find the keywords that your potential customers will be typing into Google, and to make sure you appear in the first page of the search results.
By doing so, you not only get a regular stream of new customers and expand your business, but also brand yourself as an authority business in your field.
So for anyone who is looking for an affordable way to get your business seen on the web, reach markets you haven’t reached before and establish a brand, SEO is an irreplaceable tool and the best way to go. But if you want to stand out from the competition, you better do it right – an unprofessional campaign might prove to cause more harm than good. Ensure your SEO is done right – contact Go Mungo SEO for expert guidance and results.
