Five SEO Strategies Your Business Should Master

Search Engine Optimization, also known as “SEO”, is the process of making your website more visible on a search engine’s search results page. Increasing search visibility without using paid methods. The benefit of SEO, of course, is that the higher your page is on a search results page, the more visitors to your site you’ll likely attract.

The good news is that SEO doesn’t have to be overly complicated; there are several SEO strategies that your business can employ that are straightforward and cost effective. Here are five:

1. Keep a Blog
(with relevant content)

SEO strategy number one is to keep a blog that is full of relevant content specific to your customer (in other words, if you are a handbag business, do not waste your time, or your customers’, by blogging about cake). Great blogging means: Incorporating keywords that are relevant to your business and that are optimized for your location.
Do not just limit yourself to a single keyword – try using multiple keywords and keyword phrases, e.g. “Customized wedding cakes in Houston.” As a note, you should optimize your entire site for keywords – as TINT did, resulting in a 2,600 percent increase in traffic – not just your blog.

Post on a regular and consistent basis. If you want to keep customers coming to your site and improve your SEO, you have to provide regular content. Do not post a single blog and then forget about it for the next two months. Use links that provide value to your target audience, and touch on their interests, desires, and pain points. Rather than linking to everything that you can think of, and in a way that has little value to the reader, only include those links which are authoritative and provide the user with information.

2. Make Sure Your Site Is Optimized for Mobile

There are several ways to make sure your site is optimized to increase your search visibility. Many areas should be optimized, but these have the best effect on search. Two areas you will focus on the most are security and mobile responsive. Your site needs to be secure with an SSL certificate. Typically, you can buy and activate it through your hosting provider. If your site has HTTPS before the domain, then you can count on it being secure.
The most important thing to do is ensure it’s mobile optimized. Moz’ SEO Blog has a great article on mobile optimization that explains everything from what mobile optimization is, to tactics for optimization and how to make it happen for you. Happily, most templates today (if you are using a template, such as a WordPress design for your website) are already optimized, so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself.

There’s even a term which covers this adaptability of a website to the specific platform being used by the surfer – it’s called ‘responsiveness’, and it refers to how responsive your website is when browsed through various devices. And of course, that matters to you, or at least it should, because of the overwhelming usage of mobile devices on Internet searches. There are currently more searches conducted on cellphones and laptops than on PC’s, which means a full-sized website has to be scaled to those devices for optimum presentation.

3. Develop a Content-Marketing Strategy

It’s very important that your website has some kind of strategy which is built around the keywords crucial to your specific business. When you create content like blogs, white papers, webinars, and reports, you provide many other professionals out on the Internet with an opportunity to link to your content for source material. The content you generate can be ranked by the search engines all on its own merit, and the in-bound links generated by others who reference your content adds more credibility and more value to your search ranking to your overall profile. This is especially true when you can make optimal use of important keywords right in the title of your created content because even that can add to your ranking. Another key part of this content-marketing strategy is to keep it regular, at least weekly in nature, so that Google recognizes you as an active and relevant authority of information in your industry.

4. Technical SEO tips to increase search visibility

Technical SEO is where things can get tricky. Typically, you want an SEO company to handle this aspect because it can become difficult. However, there are a couple things that can be done quite easily and have a great benefit. The areas we will cover are Keyword use, Keyword Location, and thin content.

Keywords are a crucial part of SEO. Anytime you are writing content for your site or a blog. There are some general rules to follow. When using keywords or keyword phrases (2-4 words). You want one primary phrase that you use in the: page title/blog title, paragraph heading, page content, and page URL (if possible). If you look at this blog post for example. Our focus phrase is “SEO Strategies”. If you notice, it is in the blog title, paragraph heading, and used 3-5 times in the content.

Use one focus phrase per page and list it in the recommended locations. This can be one of the best ways to get a significant increase on a search engine. To help make sure you have it in the right spots we have created a Keyword Location Checklist you can use to ensure correct keyword placement. For those who are not familiar with SEO strategies, give our office a call so we can help walk you through and understand the checklist. (435.703.6873)

Use this checklist and methods mentioned above to greatly increase your search visibility. However, you have to make sure you are not being penalized by “thin content”. Google refers to thin content, as any page on your site with less than 300 words. Pages with less than 300 words can cause site-wide penalties. It is important to make sure each page is above 300 words or all these tips might have no effect.

5. Run a Promotion

This strategy takes a bit more planning and organization but is extremely effective for your organic SEO efforts. A promotion not only draws in visitors with a great prize, but also results in social shares, traffic, and ultimately more sales. The more traffic you get, the more authoritative you appear, and the higher your search engine ranking. Here’s a brief overview of how it works: You create a contest on your website (like a create-the-best-new-flavor competition, as Lay’s has done), and offer a sweet prize for the winner (Lay’s offered $1 million, but a free membership, shoes, or the like will do, too). Then, you advertise that page on your website and share it on social media. Watch as the leads pour in!

The main reason this has such an impact is search engines feel pressure to continue providing the most relevant sites. As customers, we have high expectations for what we get back after searching certain phrases. This has caused search engines to put engagement metrics into consideration. The reason is, they feel if people are constantly clicking on your site for a certain search phrase. It is obviously extremely relative to the search phrase used.

Test Everything

Our list is nowhere extensive. The best part of working with internet marketing is how frequently things change. It seems like every six months there is a new channel to reach out to consumers. Try everything and test for the best results. Our team of marketers can help you, if you would like to give us a call, we can either manage your SEO or consult with you to target the best SEO strategies for your business (See how we worked in our keyword one last time?).

Get Help With Your SEO

SEO strategies are important to your business’s success, and the best of websites take hard work and skill. If you need a little help getting your business’s website off the ground, Contact our team at Tenth Muse today.