Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the star of the digital marketing world. It has helped many businesses achieve their goals. If you want to grow your business, you should definitely consider SEO. In this post, we are going to dig deeper into this area to discover its various aspects. So, let’s not waste any time and move ahead.
SEO- the strongest marketing tool
So, what exactly SEO is? Let’s break down the term into 2 parts:
Search Engine and Optimization
The search engine is a software solution used by online audiences to carry out their searches. The word optimization means making the best use of something to bring its efficiency to peak and in the digital world, that ‘something’ is nothing but the website.
Therefore, the term combined means, using a website in such a manner that it becomes extremely efficient for search engines.
SEO is a process in which we optimize various aspects of the website to improve its visibility online. But why is it even important? Let’s figure it out!
Why SEO is important?
The Internet has billions of active users on daily basis. With the help of SEO, you can grow your business as it will make your business website more visible. If your website is visible on the first Search Engine Result Page (SERP), more and more organic traffic will visit your website. But how does SEO work? In order to understand its importance, you first need to learn its functioning. Let’s move ahead
How does SEO work?
One of the most important factors of SEO is Keywords. These are the terms or phrases online audiences enter into search engines to explore the web.
The business website is optimized based on the keyword so that it can rank for the appropriate keywords on SERPs. For example, if you own a café in California, an appropriate keyword for your business could be ‘café in California.’ We know you are wondering how to optimize the website? Well, there are various ways through which it can be done.
Optimizing your website
On-page optimization
There is a term called on-page SEO which means optimizing the website pages. On-page SEO includes various activities and some of those are listed below.
SEO optimized content: The content on the website plays a crucial role. Your content should be optimized for the Search engine which basically means it should include keywords. This will help search engines recognize your content for the search engine query and will rank your website for the targeted keyword. The content should be of appropriate length and quality.
Meta Tags: Meta tags is the first door that search engine crosses to reach the insides of the website. Therefore, it is important to have well-optimized meta tags that include meta descriptions and meta titles.
Internal links: Linking the pages of a website with each other will help search engines explore the entire website easily. Internal links will also tell the search engine that the website pages are related to each other.
Image optimization: Optimizing media files is important for two reasons:
- It helps search engines learn about the context of the media files
- It brings down the website loading time and enhances the speed.
Image optimization contains image alt tag placement, compressing the size of media files, etc.
There you have it! These are some of the on-page techniques that are used for optimizing the website. There are many more that we didn’t mention in this post as we have to move on to our next part in which we are going to talk about off-page optimizations.
Off-page optimization
Off-page optimization is defined as the group of activities that are done outside your own website to improve its ranking on SERP. One of the most important off-page activities is link building which is basically placing the URL of your website on a third-party website.
Backlinks are important for your website as they signal the search engine that your content is good enough for another website to add it to their own content. This boosts the value of your website for the search engine which results in a higher ranking of the website on SERP. There are various backlinking activities that can be done and here are some of those.
- Guest posts
- Business directories
- Press releases
- Content submission
- Social bookmarking/classified
These off-page optimization activities are extremely effective. No one knows the exact algorithm of Google, but experts have found out that the ranking of a website depends highly upon backlinks.
Note: The third-party website should have a high domain authority as it brings outstanding results.
Global VS local SEO
Do you want to focus on your local market or the entire globe? This is an important question to ask yourself while developing a business marketing strategy to grow your business.
Small businesses should focus on their local area for the following reasons:
- It is easy to grab the attention of the local market.
- In order to grow your business, you should take small steps and start from the local market.
- The competition in the global market is extremely brutal.
If you are a small business, you should go for local SEO. Including local SEO in your small business marketing plan will make you more visible in local market. But what is local SEO? Is it something different than regular SEO? Well, not really. It is all about keyword play.
In global SEO, we work or focus on the keywords that are used globally, and in local SEO, we consider geo-focused keywords that are used locally. For example, if a user based in LA wants to find a digital marketing company, they might search ‘best digital marketing company’ to find the services globally or ‘best digital marketing company in LA’ to find a local company in their area.
It is always beneficial for small businesses to dominate the local market as proximity plays a vital role. Local SEO will make your business visible in the local market and you will be able to grab the attention of local online users.
What’s other than ranking?
Although ranking is the primary focus, it is not the only goal that businesses can achieve through SEO.
Do you know how important it is to maintain the online reputation of a business? SEO helps you out with that too. Let’s imagine your business gets associated with news that is negatively impacting it. The reputation of your business will decline rapidly. However, SEO will give you the power of dominating the first SERP which will push back all the links of negative data about your business.
Final words
We know it all sounds amazing. But there is one thing without which you cannot achieve your SEO goals and that is an effective and efficient strategy. You need to make sure to develop an SEO strategy that will help you not just increase the ranking of your website but also allow you to reach your target audience and engage with them. In case you want to grow your business by adding another domain of digital marketing, you can get your hands on Social Media Marketing (SMM) as well. SMM is another amazing part of digital marketing and can show amazing results. You should definitely consider SEO and SMM if you wish to establish a strong online presence of your business and generate more leads online.
Author Bio:
Scorpion offers top-notch technology and marketing services to local businesses that want to grow and accelerate their sales. Scorpion has a team specialized in various marketing areas such as SEO, Reviews, Advertising, Email Marketing, Chat and Messaging, social media, Websites, Lead Management, Appointment Scheduling, and more