How often do you ‘Google’ a day? Most of what we do online starts with a search. As of January 2021, Google still dominates the worldwide search engine market at 92.47% (Statista, 2021). The sheer number of Google searches carried out daily is mind-boggling. See it for yourself here.
It’s no wonder that marketers, companies and brands turn to SEO or Search Engine Optimisation to be found on the web and attract the right traffic. It’s important to know how to write, optimise content for search engines, update said content and have a basic understanding of SEO tools and analytics. It’s most definitely worth building your SEO knowledge starting right now.
3-way approach & strategy
Before you take your first steps into SEO for your small business, it’s best to revisit your brand strategy. This includes understanding your target audience(s) and brand’s position, keywords or search terms and phrases they use to search for the likes of you. Your strategy must also include building trust through content that provides your audience value - posted consistently with the help of an editorial calendar.
We all want our website to appear organically among the first few on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for the keywords that matter to our business. A good place to start is with a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis of your own website compared to the competition.
You want to comparatively assess and improve SEO in the following areas - technical, keywords and content, and linking. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush work well for competitive analysis and other SEO content marketing services.
Technical
An SEO audit for your website can be carried out with Google Search Engine Console. This includes a report on the core site vitals and mobile-friendliness of your site. It supplies a prioritised list of errors found in tags, links, code, keywords, and other mobile-friendly variables.
Keywords & Content
Content marketing and distribution are key when it comes to your SEO strategy. The first step here is to find your core list of keywords. Conduct organic keyword research and use a tool like Moz to find out the keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking for.
Ahrefs also allows you to plug competitors’ sites into a content gap tool. You can filter keywords they are ranking for that are applicable to your business and you’re missing. With some effort, you may even find certain keywords with considerable traffic that your competition is missing, that could work well for your business!
Once you have your keywords, make sure to optimise your current website content for the same - all the while ensuring your web copy reads naturally. Enhance on-page optimisation further by incorporating keywords into your title tags and meta descriptions of each webpage. Look for patterns in how your competitors or those best in your niche have done it and follow suit.
Don’t just focus on keywords for SEO though. Instead, aim to build brand visibility across all top search and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc.)
Whichever platform you use to generate content; your content needs to be of value to your audience, completely unique and plagiarism free. You don’t want to get flagged by a search engine for duplicate content and get penalised for it.
Pick a schedule or rhythm that works for you while creating content and stick with it. Search engines reward fresh content and updates to older content. Lastly, remember the same content repurposed into different formats is not considered duplicate content! Read more here.
Link Equity
For your website and web pages to start ranking, you need to work on link juice.
Google Search Console can be used to generate a backlink report to see which sites or pages are linking to you, how they are linking, if any of the links are dangerous and need your attention. Interlinking various pages within your website is also important for SEO. For example, if you have an on-site blog - interlink relevant blog posts.
Find dead and broken links through a checker in your niche and get in touch with site owners. Tell them they can link to you for the relevant content instead. 404 links are what you want to go after while using a dead link or broken link checker.
Another way to earn more external links from authoritative websites is through guest posting. Analyse your competition’s links using Ahrefs link intersect tool or similar. Find which sites you could do with linking back to you and offer to write on a topic their audience values.
Be a guest writer on their blog. Be authentic and genuine with your offer. Guest posting should primarily be a brand-building exercise rather than link-building. Your content must be relevant and solve pressing problems for your business, their business and potential customers.
Commentaires