In the age of the Internet, SEO has become a fundamental part of growing one’s business. SEO stands for search engine optimization—in other words, taking advantage of how Google, Bing, and other search engines work so that your web properties show up near the top of a search page, giving you virtually free web traffic. The reason this is so powerful isn’t just the low cost of acquisition per customer using this method, but also the fact that the potential customers you’ll draw in are already searching for the information, products, and/or services that you offer. Let’s take a look at three SEO tips to grow your business.
1. Targeting By Location
One of the most important SEO tips is to always make sure you take into account the location and customer base you’re targeting. For example, a dentist in Alabama shouldn’t target general keywords like “best dentist,” or “cheap dentist” since those terms could apply to any dentist anywhere in the country or even world.
Instead, you should make sure that you’re mapping out your SEO plan so that you target potential customers who can actually take advantage of your business. Local businesses will want to use local terms, including the names of the city and state where they operate, such as “best Alabama dentist.” On the other hand, those who sell goods online to the entire country, or the world, can be much broader in their approach to keywords and phrases.
2. Off Page SEO – Quality Over Quantity
While everyone knows about on-page SEO, which means targeting certain keywords in your content and on your website, many forget about off page SEO. Off-page SEO is a relatively simple concept, but the execution can be much more involved than on-page. Basically, off page SEO is the use of backlinks to your web properties from other sites and sources.
When Google and other search engines see that your site is being linked by other sites, it gives it more “authority” to your website. The more authority your site has, the higher it will be ranked.
The main thing to consider here is that high-quality backlinks are far more valuable than low-quality links. In the past, you could use link farms to boost your pages up to the rankings with thousands of low-quality links, but those days are long gone. These days you want to stick to getting links from sites that are well known and are higher up in the search engine results themselves. This will give your web pages the boost they need to rank higher.
3. Balancing Search Volume and Competition
When it comes to SEO tips to grow your business, this one might just be the most misunderstood. Many people only look at search volume when doing keyword research and sabotage themselves by taking on more competition than they can handle. The general rule is this: the higher the search volume that a keyword receives, the more it is targeted by people and businesses.
The unfortunate truth of the matter is that in this day and age, many of the high search volume keywords are already locked down by big businesses, and targeting them won’t do you much good. Instead, you need to look for keywords that have decent search volume with low to moderate competition. This way you won’t waste your time targeting keywords you’ll never rank for and be left wondering what went wrong.
You should also take into consideration how long your site has been around for and how many high quality backlinks it has. The more “authority” your site has, the better the chance you’ll have at ranking for more competitive keywords.
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Bonus Tip 1: SEO Firms vs In House SEO
When it comes to getting your site search engine optimized, you have two options: either doing it in the house or hiring an SEO firm to do it for you. If you’re the sole proprietor of your business, then doing it in the house means doing it yourself. You’ll have to learn all the intricacies of how on the page and off page SEO works, and implement these strategies across all your web properties.
On the other hand, you could hire an SEO firm to handle it all for you. Most will do both on-page and off-page SEO. This does present a sort of catch 22 though. The main benefit to SEO vs paid traffic is that SEO is low cost, or free if you’re doing it yourself. If you’re spending a ton on SEO services, you somewhat negate the advantage it has overpaid traffic. Your best bet is to compare your budgetary goals to your revenue goals, and strike a balance that works for your business concerning the implementation of SEO.
Bonus Tip 2: Search Engine Algorithms are Always Changing
Some people have the impression that once they do SEO on their site, they can “set it and forget it” and it will work for years and decades to come. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Search engines like Google update their algorithms all the time, meaning that the SEO strategies that work today maybe less effective tomorrow. Once you get started with SEO, you are essentially committing yourself to keeping up with search engine changes and strategy adjustments so that it remains effective for your business.
Conclusion
In the end, SEO is extremely powerful, but requires more knowledge and effort than one might think. Following these SEO tips is a great start, and will help you to get more search traffic which you can convert into leads, sales, and clients. Just make sure that you’re keeping up with the latest changes to the search engine algorithms, especially Google since that’s where most of your search traffic will likely come from. When done right you’ll power up your site, and boost it up the search rankings with ease.