Where are you currently spending your marketing dollars — radio, TV, print ads, or digital? The question on the minds of small business owners is: “How do I get someone to buy something?” For most businesses today, that question often leads to business owners searching for ways to rank high in search engine results to improve their sales positioning.
What does it take to make your site highly visible and top-ranked on search engines? There are lots of reasons why search engine optimization is important for growing businesses, but why should you care? Simply put, without it, search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) can’t find your website. And this means your target audience can’t either.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of following specific techniques and strategies to help search engines easily find and index your website. So what does it mean to be visible?
Search engine bots crawl websites to understand what they are about a what keywords they should rank for. SEO is the process of optimizing your website to show up on search engine results for keywords or phrases related to your product or services. Ultimately, when search engines index your site for the right keywords, it becomes more visible to users.
Ideally, appearing on the first page of search results offers the best marketing rewards. Recent research shows that the first result on Google gets 27.6% of all clicks, and the top three search results get 54.4% of all clicks. SEO strategies are constantly evolving as search engines keep getting smarter, but here are proven methods to improve your position on the search engine results page.
Tips for Improving Rankings in Search Engine Result Pages
Write for people, not search engines
Don’t get caught up in keyword density target — write naturally, just as you would speak with a friend. Important keywords can fit into your meta tags rather than being forced into your writing.
Your content should have a natural flow and rhythm, translating into an enjoyable experience for the reader. Search engines will also take this into consideration when ranking results.
Think of your content strategy as a puzzle
As with puzzles, the picture is clear once all the pieces come together. On the flip side, it is incomplete when just one is missing. So, how do you put the pieces of your content strategy puzzle together?
- Build Authority
- Establish Trust
- Create Lifetime Customers
Your digital content marketing strategy should aim to create a relationship with your customers through digital content, email engagement and other means. It’s true that managing your leads and customers, keeping track of emails — as well as completing your marketing “to do” list — can feel like a full-time job in itself!
Reasons Why Your SEO Efforts May Fail
When you still can’t achieve top search rankings, it’s a good idea to review your content strategy before you continue to spend lots of time and resources. Here are some of the reasons why you might not be ranking as high as you should on search results.
Overusing anchor texts
Google may have caught on to you, and excessive use of anchor texts can actually lower your site’s ranking.
Buying links
Even the most seemingly “credible” SEO “firms” and webmasters may not be in compliance with search engines. Don’t buy links. Google and the most advanced search engines can detect paid links. So focus on gaining organic backlinks by putting out thoughtful and relevant content regularly.
Ignoring your keyword research
Ask yourself, for which keywords do I want to rank? Google’s free-to-use Keyword Planner can help you uncover new keyword ideas, along with their respective competition and average Adwords’ bid prices.
Duplicating content on several pages
Duplicating content on your website means search engines are left to choose the best URL to rank higher in search results, which won’t always do you any favor.
Make Your Website SEO Friendly
For help getting visible on the web and ranking on Google or other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, contact us at 866-330-8359. At ContentFirst Marketing, we operate a collaborative model. Our SEO specialists will perform in-depth market research on your business and industry and work with your team to develop a content strategy that improves your search ranking results to ultimately improve your sales positioning.
