Are you ready to take your brand visibility to the next level?
It’s essential for businesses everywhere to implement powerful digital marketing campaigns. Honing your website and advertising on social media can do a lot for driving site traffic and conversion rates.
You can leverage all of these digital marketing efforts further by implementing a solid SEO strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is your tool when it comes to ensuring that all of your marketing efforts pay off. What’s more, it can be your answer to growing your business in the right direction.
In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can implement a powerful SEO strategy today! Read on for insight.
1. Know Your Goals
The key to implementing any successful strategy is to know its desired outcome. When it comes to SEO, it’s essential to identify coherent and tangible goals.
What specifically do you want your SEO campaign to accomplish?
Do you want to double your weekly website traffic, for example? Or do you want to attract a higher number of local customers?
Keep in mind what SEO does concern: digital visibility of your online platforms.
Spend some time identifying reasonable outcomes for your digital marketing efforts. We say “reasonable” because a lot of ineffective strategies aim for extremely high goals or set goals that are too vague to achieve.
Be specific and always start small. What’s more, make sure you identify clear steps that you can take in order to reach these goals through SEO.
This will mean that your SEO strategy is actionable. You can get to work on it with confidence, knowing that the actions you take can help you reach your desired goals.
2. Know Your Audience
SEO is a digital marketing tool. Any digital marketing strategy depends on its audience.
It is possible to launch a marketing campaign that attempts to reach anyone and everyone. But these “shotgun” techniques aren’t likely to deliver the immediate results you crave.
That’s because consumers are more likely to respond to targeted advertising–that is, marketing efforts that attempt to engage with them on their level.
The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can reach them.
You may be thinking at this point: Wait a minute. Isn’t SEO just about a bunch of search words?
From one perspective, SEO is about keywords that people type into search engines. But not just any keywords.
A specific user will type in a specific keyword given his/her need at that time. This varies from audience to audience.
For example, if you own a vegan cafe in Alabama, your audience may generally be vegans in Alabama. But what about vegans who also consume gluten-free products? How about vegans who are retirees?
The retiree and gluten-free vegans will be typing different searches into Google in order to find your cafe.
Be as specific as possible when identifying your audience. Get inside their heads a little bit.
Keep this target user in mind as you are crafting and implementing your SEO strategy.
3. Research Your Keywords Well
A successful SEO strategy operates on a powerful keyword foundation. After all, SEO exists because of the way people perform Google searches.
A typical Google search involves inputting a certain keyword or phrase designed to approximate the interest of the user. The closer you can get to choosing the keywords your target audience is likely to use, the more likely your SEO campaign is to succeed.
Build time into your strategy development to research competitive keywords. You can do this simply by performing your own organic searches for common keywords relevant to your industry.
This independent research can provide you with a visual of your current rankings, your competitors’ rankings, and trending keywords and phrases.
Use this framework as a guide in honing your keyword selection. You may want to rely on SEO professionals here in developing your SEO strategy.
But you can also rely on online keyword planning tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner. There are free alternatives on other platforms, too.
Make sure that you vary up your keywords, alternating between general and specific. You should have a different keyword per page of digital content, too.
4. Develop Your Content
The successful SEO strategy emerges from a powerful platform of content. After all, Google prioritizes sites that deliver relevant content to their visitors.
What is relevant content? Relevant content is always useful to visitors. It provides information without going overboard.
It is also well-written, to the point, and brief. It engages with visitors and demonstrates that it is a clear authority on the subjects at hand.
It also always includes a call to action that invites visitors to take a step of some kind. This can boost conversions and prove your authority further.
Check out Google’s thoughts on the matter.
All of the content on your website should be relevant in this respect. Before you launch any SEO campaign, make sure your web copy meets this standard.
If you’re preparing an SEO campaign for social media or a blogging platform, choose your content wisely. Remember that consumers themselves go after rich content.
Rich content can be useful, intriguing, or quite simply funny.
Consumers also appreciate content that is engaging. You may want to incorporate live videos or images into your strategy as a result.
(Yes, you can optimize videos and images! Learn more about this here.)
5. Leverage Other Platforms
SEO works best when you have an indomitable online presence. This means taking advantage of other digital platforms besides your website alone.
At the top of this list is social media. As a business of any kind, you should have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
We’re not talking just cursory profiles, either. It’s important to have extensive profiles on these platforms and to keep them active.
Maintain your social media presence by posting content frequently. Interact with other business owners and share content by companies you respect. Set up messaging so that you can engage with customers.
All of this can boost your ranking on Google, quite simply because it tells the search engine that you are earnest, credible, and authoritative.
It’s also essential to use social media in SEO campaigns. Launch an SEO strategy that’s all about Instagram, for example.
Social media can help you easily reach your target user. Paired with SEO, it can transform your site’s traffic in a heartbeat.
6. Implement Local SEO
Your SEO strategy should also keep local audiences in mind. This is especially important if you are a brick-and-mortar institution that depends on local customers to keep profit margins fat.
Local SEO means choosing keywords that local individuals are likely to type into Google to find your business.
This may involve a location. For example, someone may type in “bicycle shop in Bozeman” to find a local supplier.
Local SEO keywords don’t have to name specific towns, though. It’s possible for someone to search for “bicycle shops in the northwest” or “bicycle shop near me.”
Leverage your local SEO strategy by gathering a host of local citations. This means registering your business on Google My Business and other review platforms such as TripAdvisor or Yelp.
Once you’ve done this, you can even craft an SEO strategy designed to get more online reviews! Online reviews can be powerful influencers when it comes to boosting your reputation and gaining digital visibility.
7. Stay Adaptive
A successful SEO strategy keeps one sober fact at the fore: SEO is always changing.
The landscape of SEO today is different from what it was yesterday. This will always be the case.
Google, for one, is always changing up its algorithms. These algorithms determine site ranking and authority.
Consumers are also frequently shifting. What’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow. As time passes, preferences adapt.
Your SEO strategy should incorporate a healthy amount of flexibility. SEO isn’t an implement-and-leave-it digital marketing campaign.
It requires vigilance and a willingness to modify existing efforts.
Stay on top of your SEO campaign by keeping track of its performance on a daily basis. You can do this by using tools such as Google Analytics, which give you a visual for how your SEO efforts are paying off.
Marketers can also perform regular keyword audits to assess their strength. Weak keywords can tank your rankings and compromise any SEO campaign.
8. Consult Experts in the Field
It is possible to implement a successful SEO strategy on your own. But a lot of business owners simply don’t have the time for this.
Some small businesses may not have a dedicated marketing staff to tackle digital marketing efforts.
In any case, you can deliver a solid SEO campaign by relying on experts in the industry. SEO professionals can help you identify optimal keywords and implement them powerfully.
Contact David on Linkedin too for international SEO expertise!
You and Your SEO Strategy
It’s critical for any business to take advantage of all that SEO has to offer. You can implement a powerful strategy by knowing your goals, target audience, and methodology.
What’s more, experience the greatest SEO impact by honing your content and leveraging social media platforms. You’ll find great value in local SEO and in staying flexible.
At FindABusinessThat.com, we love connecting individuals to the services you need. If you’re keen to hire some SEO experts, find them here!