One of the essential things to know as an online marketer is how to generate traffic to their site. There are many ways to get traffic to a site, but one of the best methods is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.
The aim of practising SEO is to get your site to rank highly (preferably in the top five results) on top of search engine result pages for your chosen keywords. Once you rank well, your site passively attracts targeted visitors ready to become clients.
SEO is not a one-off practice but rather a series of actions you must take so Google and Co see your site or page on your site as one of the most relevant for the keyword.
This article covers the five most important factors to implement for successful SEO.
Keyword Research
Effective SEO campaigns begin with researching the best keywords to match your products or services. You need to determine what your customers type into the search bar when looking for your type of products.
Google’s Keyword Planner helps you find related keywords to your topic and the search volume, but you must set your account to Expert Mode rather than Smart Mode to get detailed data. A much easier solution is to use a tool such as Keysearch Co. Keysearch offers a free trial, or you can pay for one month, and once you have your list of keywords, cancel if you no longer have use for the service.
Enter your topic or niche in the search bar for whatever service you choose. If you sell a skin cream, you would enter “skin cream” or “skin care” and click search. The tool will give you data about the searches made in your niche and suggest keywords to use.
Once you have a list, you can delete the keywords you deem irrelevant or too competitive, leaving you with a list of phrases that customers are likely to use when looking for your product or service that are possible to rank for.
A good way to build authority and provide helpful information on your website for your visitors is to not only focus on buying keywords such as “skin cream” but also to educate your audience with question-related key phrases. This could be something along the lines of “Which skin cream is best for oily skin?” These types of key phrases are excellent titles for blog posts to help you get traffic to your site and build trust and authority.
On-Page Optimisation
You can have the best-looking website in your industry, but it won’t achieve high rankings in the search engines if there are problems with the website structure.
The first thing you must do is optimise each page for a different keyword. To do this, include targeted keywords and phrases within the content and metadata.
Once your site is published, run a technical SEO audit to see if any issues might prevent Google from indexing your page or website. A good audit will also bring up other issues and tell you what to do to fix any problems regarding site speed, internal linking, site responsiveness, and redirects, among many other factors.
Technical SEO is the most complex type of SEO to implement yourself. Unless you are experienced, you may need help from a web developer to correct any issues that could be stopping your site from ranking well.
Once the technical side of SEO is implemented correctly, you can expect to see your site rise in the search engines.
Content Marketing
All successful SEO campaigns need a content strategy. You need plenty of useful content for your target market to rank highly on search engines. The more pages you have on your site targeting relevant keywords, the more Google will understand your site and place it higher in the ranks above your competitors. Unfortunately, these days, it isn’t enough to write a couple of blog posts and expect to get tons of visitors.
To ensure our content marketing strategy is consistent, at The Search Equation, we use editorial schedules which we follow to post regularly to our client’s websites. Creating good content is a time investment, and as a busy business owner, you may not have time to write the content yourself. However you will find many freelancers offering writing services who can do an excellent job for you or use an established marketing agency like us to implement a content strategy for you.
Project management tools such as Monday.com and Proof Hub are available, to name just two of many. These management tools allow you to oversee your content strategy and develop a workflow where you can review posts written by writers and give feedback or revisions on the work.
Link Building
Once you have determined which keywords your customers are searching for, have a content marketing strategy in place, and the technical side of the site is fixed, it is time to think about link building.
In very low-competition niches, link building may be optional. But if you are trying to rank phrases dominated by authoritative or well-known companies, it doesn’t matter how good your content is, you will need the assistance of do-follow links.
A do-follow link from an authority passes some of the authority from the original site to the one it links to. So, when you earn a backlink from a trustworthy site, its reputation seeps down to your website, making it more authoritative in Google’s algorithm than previously.
An excellent way to identify website authority is to refer to Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. This is a calculation based on the link profile of a website. The higher the DR, the more authoritative it is, So you need to look for websites with a high domain ranking when starting a link-building campaign.
Simply emailing a site and asking them to place a backlink on your site is very unlikely to bring you any success. It would help if you gave the other site a reason to link to yours. Despite what Google might say, guest posting is still a great way to get a link from a website. You provide the site owners with an informative article of relevance to their users containing a link to your site—this way, both parties benefit.
There are many other ways to build links to your site, including giving testimonials, listing your site in trustworthy directories, and asking website owners to add a link if they have already mentioned your product but not linked to it.
However, not all backlinks are equal or beneficial. Some can even do your site more harm than good. Therefore, research before building backlinks or get a reputable SEO agency, such as ourselves, to do the work on your behalf.
SEO Outsourcing
If you are selling a product or service, you may find it challenging to find the time to implement a successful SEO campaign. In this scenario, the most effective solution is to outsource SEO work to an individual or an agency that knows the process.
To find a good agency or freelancer, you can start by looking for providers working locally. The advantage of working with a local SEO agency or freelancer is that you can speak to them in person and decipher the results they achieved with other local businesses. Study their reviews from previous customers on platforms like Google Business Profile and Trustpilot to get an idea if they can deliver work that will get your site where you want it, towards the top of the search engine rankings.
One of the best ways to find out if an SEO agency can deliver the goods is to do a search related to their service. For example, if you type in “SEO agency Manchester” the site that ranks first for this term is likely to do a better job than an agency site ranking on the 5th page. If a company cannot rank their own website well, there is little chance of them ranking yours.
Summary
Search engine optimisation is a way of gaining traffic that, when done well and consistently, gives you the highest return on investment compared to other marketing methods, such as Pay-Per-Click or social media ads. Once you rank highly for your chosen keywords, you will get clicks from targeted users looking for your products and services. Because this traffic is essentially free, it is known as organic traffic. Depending on the search term volume, the search engines will deliver hundreds of thousands of organic visitors every day at no extra cost to you.
The best thing about SEO is you don’t have to promote your website continuously, as organic traffic is passive traffic, and you can expect to retain your ranking for some time with little or no extra effort.
Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need help with your SEO campaign. We are a long-established SEO agency with clients who have remained with us for over a decade. Furthermore, many of our clients contact us after word-of-mouth recommendations.
Fill out the form today, and we will get back to you as soon as possible to discuss how we can help you reach your SEO goals.
