Every business wants to show up on the top of search results when consumers are searching for product or service that they sell. Every single day millions of people turn to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines to help them find what they are looking for.
People use search engines to find more information about the products or services they’re thinking of buying, along with the businesses they want to buy from. Consumers often check search engines before dealing with a big national company, and they also use them when planning local purchases.
Reaching the top of the search results takes a lot of hard work and a solid SEO strategy. When done correctly, search engine optimization can help your business attract more leads and sales, which results in more revenue.
If you are not making an effort to improve your organic search engine ranking positions you are missing opportunities on a daily basis. Here are five basic tips to help improve your organic rankings.
1. Identify Your Target Keywords
Your keyword research will decide if your search optimization efforts succeed or fail. Many businesses wrongly choose their keywords based only on search volume. This can result in trying to rank for keywords that are hard and expensive to improve, or even keywords that don’t attract buyers and just bring in unhelpful traffic to the site.
It is important to target keywords that your target consumer is likely to search for while looking for the product or service that you offer. For example, if you are an accounting firm located in Miami you would not want to target a general keyword such as “accounting firm.” Not only is it a very difficult keyword, but also you will be attracting visitors from all over the globe. Instead, you would want to target a more precise keyword such as “accounting firm in Miami” or “Miami accounting firm.”
2. Get Your On-Page Optimization Perfect
There is absolutely no reason why your on-page optimization should not be perfect. It can mean the different between your website showing up on page three of the search results and your website being the top listing. We encounter so many local businesses that simply ignore their on-page optimization (or the prior SEO company didn’t optimize correctly).
Instead of repeating the steps to optimizing your on-page factors, we will point you to a detailed explanation and guide that you can read to see what you need to do to get your on-page optimization perfect. Check out our definitive on-page optimization guide to learn more.
3. Develop Your Content Strategy
You should have a blog on your website. This allows you to constantly add new content to your website. The search engines love websites that are constantly updated with fresh content. In their eyes a website that is constantly updated provides more value to the end user.
Every new blog post that you publish gives you an opportunity to spread it through social media, which helps to drive more traffic back to your site. Use your blog as a way to connect with your audience. Your blog isn’t a place to just post overly promotional posts. This is an opportunity to address possible concerns or even common questions related to your service or product. If you are worried about coming up with enough content ideas to publish blog posts on a regular basis then check out these resources:
Need More Blog Content Ideas? Try These 5 Suggestions
Out of Blog Post Ideas? Use These 3 Content Suggestions
3 Tips to Kick Start Your Content Marketing
Super Charge Your Content Marketing With a Limited Budget
If you are have been publishing content on a regular basis you might want to perform a content audit on your website.
4. Attract High Quality Links
Links to your site still (and will continue to) play an important role in SEO. While the wrong approach and the wrong links can get your website penalized, the right high quality links can help you reach the top of the organic search results.
If you (or your SEO agency) are using spammy SEO strategies it is time to stop before it is too late. Google’s is constantly rolling out algorithm updates and refreshes in an attempt to clean up their search results and keep spam from ranking.
Guest blogging and infographic distribution are great ways to attract high quality links. Do not focus on the total number of links. Spend your time focused on quality links, from websites that are highly relevant to your business. If any SEO company tells you that they can rank your website virtually overnight you need to turn around and run away…fast. Google will continue to refresh their Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates, so make sure that you are focusing on quality rather than quantity.
5. Monitor Performance & Continue to Optimize Your SEO Efforts
You need to constantly monitor your keyword rankings and determine whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. Not only do you need to be monitoring your rankings but you need to dive deep into your analytics and determine what keywords and traffic sources are producing the most conversions.
Using this data can help you identify additional “buyer” keywords to target and what keywords to stop targeting. Keyword research, content marketing, and link building are things that you need to constantly be doing, even when you reach the top of the search rankings. Many businesses think that they can slow down these efforts once they reach the top, but easing up on your SEO strategy will see your competition take over the top position if you are not continually improving your search engine optimization effort.
Now, these are just some very basic tips to help with your SEO efforts. If you are interested in learning how a professionally managed SEO campaign can help your business grow contact us for a free consultation. We can create a custom solution for businesses of all sizes.