19 Apr Why SEO Is Important For Your Business

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, a term used to describe the practice of tailoring content and website structure to benefit your ranking in search engine results and acquiring more traffic by anticipating the intent of the searcher. SEO is important for any business with an online presence, as ranking for your key search terms means appearing higher in search results. If your business name is important, and many of your customers identify with it, you’ll want to rank for it. If you have competition online, you’ll want to position your business in search to be able to capture market share. If you’re a local business with a storefront, you’ll want to make it easy for prospects to find you and contact you. If you have a proprietary business process or unique product offering, you’ll want to rank for those terms too. Now that you better understand why SEO is important for your business, let’s take a look at what you can do to be competitive in search.

How Has SEO Changed?

Search engines are continually updating their algorithms to better serve users searching for specific keywords and asking certain questions. These incremental changes aren’t always publicized, but some of the more notable updates, such as last year’s mobile friendly Google update, are well-covered, as Google tries to keep website owners updated on best practices. Some things that used to work but are now less relevant include: ● Keyword stuffing. Intentionally putting a lot of keywords on the pages of a website, even those that are irrelevant, in an attempt to get more traffic. ● Low quality guest posting. Guest posting as a strategy still works, but submitting low quality content and doing it for links is ineffective. ● Thin, duplicate, or irrelevant content. Search engines want to serve searchers with the best content on the web, which means low quality content isn’t going to earn you more traffic. In 2016, it is anticipated that the importance of social media, video, mobile optimization, voice search function, content aggregation and local SEO will continue to grow in prominence (SEO Nick).

How To Take A Long-Term Approach To Your SEO

The reality is that your optimization efforts will not yield immediate results. You must take a long-term approach to Search Engine Optimization if you want it to pay off. Your first step should be to identify what your sales process is. If you don’t understand why this is relevant for SEO, you will in a moment. Do you have a sales funnel in place, and is it already working? If so, you can move onto the next step. Otherwise, you should discuss it with your team and come up with a plan. Your sales funnel will drive the type of content you create to move target customers through the sales process. For example, if you’re selling a social media SaaS – that’s Software As A Service – app and you’re finding that most of your visitors and leads have never used SaaS software before, you might want to create a collection of tutorials and how-to guides on how to best take advantage of your platform. From a big-picture perspective, you would also want to think about where to take your leads after they have read a post. On-page optimization should also be prioritized. This means things like title tags, headings, internal linking, building your online reputation, and so on. Note: internal linking is a great strategy to call attention to content in your archives, but not something you should overdo. According to Moz, some of the most important on-page factors include: ● Quality content on the page, as good content supplies a demand and is linkable. ● The title tag. An accurate and descriptive title of the on-page content. ● The URL. A URL that clearly shows the hierarchy of the information on the page and includes keywords is better than a URL structure that includes random alphanumeric and special characters. ● Image alt text. This text describes the photo and may include additional keywords, such as those from Google’s “related searches” displayed at the bottom of search engine results pages (SERPs).

Final Thoughts

Don’t become too dependent on search results, as algorithm updates can easily affect the traffic coming to your site. It’s always a good idea to have a well-diversified portfolio of traffic sources so that you aren’t at risk of losing the audience you’ve worked hard to built. But search is extremely important, as most businesses find that it’s one of their top sources of traffic. It’s better to cooperate with Google and make incremental improvements to your website than to ignore SEO completely. Are you looking for help with your SEO? Get in touch with us to discuss your next project.