Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of digital marketing. If your website doesn’t rank well on the search engine results page, there’s no way for your existing or potential customers to find you on search engines if they want to do business with you.
A lot is at stake. You will lose them to competitors who rank better than you and lose web traffic, leads, and sales. All your marketing efforts will go down the drain.
Applying SEO for marketing is that important. Doing it right will change how you do your business, big time.
SEO for Marketing
You’re missing out on many opportunities if you’re not doing SEO.
SEO is the process of improving your website to rank it higher on the search engine results page (SERP). The aim is to get on the first page because this is where people will find you to become your potential customers or clients.
Luckily, it’s not difficult to get started with SEO. Many resources are available to help you learn what you need to know. You can start by reading our blogs or other sites with reputable resources. Once you start seeing results, you’ll be glad you made an effort.
See how our team can drive an insane amount of highly targeted traffic to your website and then convert it.
Websites that sell:
Most websites don’t convert, your’s will.
SEO that ranks:
Get on the first page of Google, guaranteed.
Ads that work:
Clear predictable returns.
Content Marketing:
Our team will create the images, write the articles and grow your brand.
On-page and technical optimization – how to make your website as search engine friendly as possible?
On-page optimization is an essential part of SEO. It’s about ensuring your website is as search-engine-friendly as possible. Here are a few key things you can do:
- Perform keyword research
- Write high-quality and authoritative content
- Place importance on your metadata
- Make sure your website is user-friendly on mobile devices
Perform Keyword Research
Keywords have many different types. Knowing how to use them correctly will affect your performance on search engines.
Start by knowing the most basic types: the short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are general terms consisting of three words or less. Ranking for these keywords is challenging.
These keywords are often used on a homepage or in creating pillar content. From there, you can build your pages with more specific keywords.
Long-tail keywords are longer. These are more specific keywords with less competition but also receive less traffic.
On a positive note, ranking for a page or article is easier when you use them. Using long-tail keywords is recommended if your website is new and your brand is still not well known.
For a successful SEO strategy, use both short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Pay attention to the intent behind keywords.
There’s always an intention why users type keywords on search engines. These can be one or a combination of the following:
- to be informed
- to look for a specific brand or website
- to buy
Knowing the intent will help you create the best content to satisfy your target audience.
If you want to know your target audience’s intent behind typing a keyword, the easiest way is to type it on a search engine and look at what kind of content ranks on the first page.
Write High-Quality and Authoritative Content
Your content should be well-researched, unique, and informative. Google is constantly evolving. Gone are those days when people could stuff keywords or write long, repetitive, and useless content for better ranking.
With Google’s most recent “people-first content” update, its priority is to reward the content that can provide the most satisfying experience to its visitors.
According to Google (2022), you’re on the right track if you meet the following criteria:
- Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you?
- Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)?
- Does your site have a primary purpose or focus?
- After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
- Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?
- Are you keeping in mind our guidance for core updates and for product reviews?
Place Importance on Your Metadata
Metadata is essential in SEO because it helps search engines identify what your webpage is all about, and it’s a factor where search crawlers can determine if a webpage is to be indexed or not.
There are more than ten different types of metadata. Others are helpful for SEO, and others don’t. The best examples of metadata that can help in your SEO are the following:
- Title
- Description
- Alt tags
- Robot
- Viewport
Title and description
The title and meta description are among the most important types of metadata, as they are the first ones that the users will see on the search results page.
If you provide accurate details on your webpage’s title and description with a catchy word structure, the users will click on it, improving your click-through rate (CTR).
Alt Tags
Search engines are not humans. They don’t know if a photo has green leaves, humans, or animals. Using alt-tags is how you can tell search engines and visually-impaired users what is in the image. Alt-tags also help improve the indexing of a site’s images on search engines.
Robots
Robots.txt is metadata that tells search engine crawlers what to index on your website. It’s your way of telling the crawlers which pages you don’t want to be indexed, such as your ‘Thank You’ page after someone fills out a form or your site’s WordPress login page.
Viewport
Viewport tells a search engine how to render a webpage on a mobile device. It contributes to the user-friendliness of your site on mobile phones.
Pay Attention to the User-Friendliness of Your Website on Mobile Devices.
Google provides two reasons you should pay attention to your website’s performance on your mobile devices.
- Speed update
- Mobile-first indexing
Speed Update
According to Google (2018), page speed is now a ranking factor.
“People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”
Mobile-First Indexing
In 2019, Google enabled Mobile-First Indexing:
“Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. Historically, the index primarily used the desktop version of a page’s content when evaluating the relevance of a page to a user’s query. Since the majority of users now access Google Search with a mobile device, Google primarily crawls and indexes pages with the smartphone agent going forward.”
Google uses one indexing method. Now it’s the Mobile-First Indexing.
With this update, the search engine will primarily use the mobile version of your website’s content to rank pages from your website, regardless if the user is using a mobile device or a desktop.
In other words, Google may not rank your website if it’s not user-friendly on mobile devices, regardless if it is for desktops.
Off-page optimization – how to get other websites to link back to your site?
Backlinks are currently among the most crucial factors to rank high in the SERP. It refers to the links from another website to yours. The higher the quality of the backlinks, the higher your chances of ranking.
Here are some ways to get backlinks:
- Social media
- Forum posting
- Guest posting
- Citations in Google My Business and online directories
- Reach out to bloggers and other reputable sites
Social Media
One way to build backlinks on social media is to post high-quality content on your website and share it on your social media pages. You may also join groups related to your industry and share your content with a link to your website.
Additionally, you can reach out to bloggers and other website owners and ask them to share your content.
Forum Posting
Answer questions and respond on a forum with detailed and helpful information. Include a link to your website as a source of your response. This method will help you build backlinks and generate traffic to your website.
Guest Posting
Guest posting involves writing articles for other websites in exchange for a link back to your site.
But don’t just write on any website. Find websites in your industry with a high authority that accept guest articles where you can include a link to your website.
Citations In Google My Business and Online Directories
Google My Business is one of the essential local SEO strategies. It helps you rank higher in the SERP, especially for local searches.
You can improve your local SEO by listing a citation (online reference to your business’s name, address, and phone number) on reputable online directories.
Reach Out to Bloggers and Other Reputable Sites
If guest posting is impossible, reach out to bloggers and other reputable sites in your industry and ask them to link to a webpage on your site.
Send them an email requesting them if they can link to your article related to their post.
Measuring the success of your SEO efforts
You will know if your SEO marketing efforts are effective by taking the following variables into account:
- Organic traffic
- CTR
- SERP ranking
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Website authority
- Page speed
- Time spent on a page
- Number of pages per visit
- Keywords’ quality
To determine how your website performs on the SERP with these variables, use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These free tools allow you to track the performance of these variables.
Other helpful SEO tools that you can use to track your SEO performance or search for high-quality keywords are:
- Moz
- Google Trends
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Google keyword planner (embedded inside Google Ads)
- Screaming Frog
- SEoptimer
Tips to keep in mind when applying SEO for marketing
Stay away from black hat techniques.
Black hat SEO describes the unethical SEO tactics that violate a search engine’s rules and guidelines.
Some of the most common black hat SEO tactics include:
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking
- Spamdexing
- Duplicate content
- Rich snippets spamming
Using these techniques can get your website penalised or even banned from a search engine, and once it happens, going back will be difficult or even impossible.
Because of this, it’s best to stick to white hat SEO methods. Although the process requires a lot of dedication and effort, it will pay off in the long run.
Final Thoughts
SEO for marketing is vital for any business wanting to grow online. If done correctly, your site will rank higher on the SERP, get more organic traffic, and improve your ROI.
But SEO is a long-term task that requires dedication, time, money, and effort.
As a business owner, you have limited resources to do all the tasks related to your business, and we understand that you should spend most of your time and attention on the core.
Time-consuming tasks, such as SEO, social marketing, and website creation, shouldn’t be your priorities.
And this is where we can help you. Results and Co can be your partner. We will do all these time-consuming tasks, so you can focus on what’s essential to your business.
Schedule a call today, and let’s work together to reach your goals.
