Contrary to what some people may think, running a small business isn’t an easy task. Even the task of marketing your business online can be very difficult. You may need to hire the services of an effective SEO company or learn the ropes in SEO yourself. Getting SEO right is essential to success in online marketing.
The goal is to make your web pages rank high on search results. Towards this end, you’ll need to gain a better understanding of SEO basics and make sure that the SEO must-dos are all taken care of. Here are the SEO tasks you need to do at least twice each month if you truly want to achieve success:
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- Identify Your Target Audience
This is the necessary first step towards a successful SEO campaign. After all, you can’t just set up a website and then try to get as many people to visit it as you can. Remember that web traffic isn’t your only concern. More importantly, you need to work on achieving a good conversion rate. A good way to do that is to target an online audience that’s sure to be interested in what you have to offer. The design of your website, the content you create, and all of your online activities will then be focused on addressing the needs and wants of this target audience.
It’s important to identify your target audience so your SEO efforts
can be directed right at them. - Determine the Demand
You can’t create your own demand with SEO. This makes it important for you to determine what your target market’s demands are. Your responsibility will then be to meet those demands. As part of identifying demand, you’ll have to do some keyword research. All you need to do in this case is draw up a list of keywords you think your target audience will use and then use tools such as Google keywords Planner to see which of the keywords on your list are the most searched. If you can find highly-searched keywords with little competition, then use those.
- Identify Your Target Audience
- Choose the Right Platform
You may be doing everything right in terms of website design and content creation, but if your company website is built on a platform that is extremely difficult for search engines to crawl, then your SEO efforts aren’t likely to do you much good. This may come as a surprise to you, but there are actually a lot of business websites that are built on the wrong platforms and this mistake is the only thing that’s keeping them from achieving their SEO goals. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake. Let’s say you’ve decided to set up a blog for your business. It would be best for you to use WordPress for this purpose. This particular platform was established with SEO as one of its main targets, so you can’t go wrong in choosing it as your blog platform.
Choosing the right platform is important to gain optimum results from your SEO efforts.
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- Create High-Quality Content
The size of your business doesn’t change the fact that excellent content is the king of SEO. While choosing the right keywords can get your target audience to your site, excellent content is what keeps them there. Make sure your site has a good mix of content: blog posts, news articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, white papers, and/or webinars. Of course, you’ll always have to make sure your content addresses both the expressed and implied needs of your target audience. Your content also has to be interesting, engaging, and relevant so as to promote audience loyalty.
- Create High-Quality Content
- Tweak Your Content Periodically
You can’t just create high-quality content and then just leave it on your site. From time to time, you need to check your keyword density, URLs, title tags, Meta tags, and images Alt tags to make sure everything is still relevant and performing well. You can also fine-tune your web pages by complementing articles with attractive images. Be careful not to place too many images on your website, though, since search engines typically can’t see them. Their primary purpose is to make your web pages attractive to visitors. It is also advisable to add links to pages on authoritative websites that cover the same subject. This helps you achieve co-citation in a natural manner.
- Monitor Performance
All of the activities you embark on for SEO purposes should be measurable so you’ll know how well your site is performing and if you need to make some adjustments to improve your performance. It is especially important to monitor the performance of a new web page. If you somehow fail to achieve a first-page ranking, you may have to make some adjustments or conduct off-site SEO activities like guest blogging, link building, and social media marketing. Remember that SEO is an ongoing business campaign, which is why you need to keep monitoring your performance and adjusting your strategies to ensure you stay on top.
You need to constantly monitor your performance so you’ll know if goals have been achieved or adjustments are needed.
Bonus Tip: Take advantage of social media. Social media marketing is all the rage these days and the good thing about this is that it gives you the opportunity to connect with your target audience where they live.
As a small business owner, you’d do well to start working on your social media marketing campaign using the most popular social networking sites. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, or LinkedIn if you are B-to-B.
You may also want to set up accounts in industry-specific social media sites for a more targeted approach. What’s important is for you to focus on just a few sites, to begin with. You may then use other social media platforms in the future as your business starts to grow.
The biggest problem small businesses face in terms of SEO is their lack of consistency where their SEO activities are concerned. By keeping the above tips in mind and making sure your company regularly engages in the activities discussed, you should be well on your way towards achieving a consistent and productive SEO campaign. Soon enough, your search rankings are bound to improve leading your company’s web traffic and conversion rates to increase.