You couldn’t possibly spend five minutes online without stumbling upon an ad for this company or a promotional video for that brand. We live in an age where everything is online, and any business hoping to achieve any form of success has to invest in its online presence. While social media is a large factor in the success of any business, it is search engine optimization that really makes the difference, and it plays the biggest role in how well your brand can reach your target audience. Through SEO, your search engine ranking will improve, and your website will appear to people online more often. But how do you get into the world of SEO, and its practices the same for all businesses?
The similarities
The fact is, for the most part, all industries do practice similar search engine optimization strategies. It doesn’t matter if you’re an online clothing store or a lawyer; some practices are important to any business hoping to expand its reach online because they’re basic SEO approaches that need to be followed. These are some of them.
Keyword search
Keyword search is arguably the most important SEO practice, and it’s one of the major deciding factors in how well your content will be optimized—which ultimately reflects on your search engine ranking, as well as your reach. It’s quite simple, really. You have a website offering a service or a product, and you want people to find that website. Your target audience performs their search online when they look for something, usually mentioning certain key expressions or words. Simply put, your website needs to include those keywords so people can find them. The more strategically they’re placed, the easier people will be able to find your business.
Quality content
It also doesn’t matter what industry you’re in when it comes to the quality of the content you’re giving your audience. If what’s written on your website is bad, people won’t linger on, and they won’t take the action you want them to. Investing in the creation of high-quality, engaging content isn’t exactly optional to any business online. Google takes the overall quality of your content into account for its search rankings, and the better it is, the higher you rank. You need to also make sure you provide fresh content regularly because that way people will keep coming back.
Excellent user experience
Quality of content and keyword placement are important and everything, but it won’t really matter at all if you don’t provide users with excellent user experience on your website. Let’s say you lived in a place like Melbourne; chances are, there are plenty of competitors out there offering similar services to yours, and they all have websites. If the user experience on yours is poor, the target audience will just leave it and go to another. This is why it is crucial that you use the best SEO Melbourne has to offer when it comes to strategy; that’s the way to reach a lot of people. Google takes user experience seriously, and if it’s found to be poor on your website, then your ranking will keep going down until you optimize your pages. Here, optimizing means improving the loading speed of every page, and creating a seamless navigation experience where users won’t have to suffer to figure out how to get from one place to another on the site. That way, they can easily complete the action that you need them to. Studies show that over half of the users on Google leave a website if the page takes more than three seconds to load! So, that’s definitely something you need to work on, no matter what industry you’re in.
Mobile responsiveness
Speaking of excellent user experience, you do know that most people view websites from their phones, right? When they’re looking for anything from a car mechanic for a luxury suite in Hawaii, it’s a safe bet that the majority of people will take out their phones to do the search. That means that your business, whatever it may be, needs to have a mobile-friendly website that won’t lag. This is especially the case for online stores that get tons of purchases through mobile phones.
Backlinking
Backlinking is when a website hosts links redirecting users to other websites—hopefully yours—and it’s another critical SEO strategy that businesses of all kinds need. As you might have guessed, having other pages link back to you significantly improves your Google ranking, and you’ll start climbing higher up the search results for more people to find you. This is provided that you create credible backlinks from respectable websites, not just dump a reference to yours in any shady online resource you can find—Google is smart, and this will hurt your rankings. More importantly, backlinks build trust and credibility for your brand. When people see a link to another website in an article they’re reading, they assume that the other company is credible, and it’s someone trustworthy. Build enough quality backlinks, and your brand’s reputation will soar higher than you could have ever imagined.
The differences
As mentioned earlier, SEO strategies are common in most industries, but there are some minor variations depending on the business itself. For instance, local businesses that have physical stores must invest in local SEO—services like co-working spaces, carpenters, cafés, and other businesses that are located in a certain area. In that case, it’s best for the company to register with websites like Google Maps, Yelp, and the likes, to boost its local SEO ranking, and in turn, the more people will discover the brand in a particular area. Search engine optimization has become a cornerstone of any marketing plan for all businesses in this day and age. It is how you get to grow and expand your business, and if you do it right, you just might go big. There are agreed-upon SEO practices that you’ll find any company applying, and then there are some special cases where a business might have to do something extra. This is why it’s best to deal with experts when it comes to strategies for SEO because they’ll help you figure out exactly what it is you need for your particular business.
