What Every Online Business Needs to Know about SEO Marketing

Most businesses have a general idea of what SEO marketing is, but many don’t take advantage of it to drive more revenue and value.

When executed effectively, a good SEO strategy will increase brand awareness, credibility, and relevance, all the while honing in on a great online customer experience.

Introduction

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your digital content so that search engines rank your page at the top for certain keywords.

The average organic click-through rate (CTR) that the first desktop search result gets on Google stands at 32%. You want your CTR as close to this number as possible, or higher.

It will be hard. 90.63% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google.

Ready to begin? Let’s get started on the basics of SEO marketing.

• On-site optimization

  On-site SEO includes strategies you can implement directly on your website to rank higher in search engine results. This could include a variety of SEO marketing tactics, such as:

  • Accurate page titles. This is the first indicator that search crawlers use to derive the helpfulness of your site content. Make sure you include the most important keywords at or near the beginning of each title.

  • Clear and informative URLs. Clean code matters, and the easiest way to use this to your advantage is in URLs. They should concisely describe the content of the page (again, keep keywords in mind) and use hyphens to separate one word from the other to maintain readability.

  • Fast page load speed. Search engines look for sites that offer an overall positive user experience, and page speed has an enormous effect on user experience (UX).

  • Ease of navigation. The more clicks you need to get to any sub-page, the fewer chances that page has of ranking high on search engines. It’s crucial to ensure that all important pages can be accessed intuitively, starting from the home menu.

  Make sure the SEO agency you hire delivers search engine optimization that fully integrates proven web design practices.

• Keywords.

  The most basic form of this is placing the right key phrases and tags on your site’s pages.

  The goal of this practice is to alert search engines to the subject matter of each page. By recognizing highly searched words, they will be able to determine which topics are covered in the content.

  In general, you want to strike a balance between words that are specific (long-tail keywords) and words that are broad (short-tail keywords).

  This can be achieved by creating content that is tailored to a certain topic, but transferrable to a variety of uses. That way, you can leverage many related keywords that cater to both specific and broad search terms.

  Recommended Reading:

  • Outsourcing SEO: Is It Right For Your Business?
• Off-site optimization.

  Off-site optimization is the opposite of on-site optimization.

  It refers to the process of increasing search rankings using tactics that do not directly appear on your website.

  This includes catering to Google’s search for sites that it considers authoritative or important sources for information. A way to gain such authority is through being linked to other reputable or popular sites.

  This indicates that your content has been validated by other respected sources as a reference or peer, and therefore improves your credibility.

  Unfortunately, this is difficult to control as others must make the choice to link to your website. Although hard to measure, the best way to entice others to do so is to make great content that is easily shared.

  This can be through blog posts, press releases, or any other form of consistent, informational content.

• White-hat SEO.

  Google defines white-hat SEO as “techniques that aim to improve a site by focusing on the visitors instead of on ranking higher.”

  More broadly, white-hat SEO focuses on legal optimization techniques that drive meaningful website traffic and increase rankings.

  The opposite of white-hat SEO is black-hat SEO. This is the use of illegal means of achieving high ranking, such as:

  • Keyword stuffing

  • Buying links to your site

  • Creating fake pages for the purpose of adding backlinks

  • Page swapping (replacing a webpage that has a high ranking with a lower-ranking webpage)

  • Deceptive URLs and page titles

  When caught, black-hat SEO is almost guaranteed to get your online platform banned from search engine rankings, no matter how well they performed previously.

  With Google’s Penguin 4.0 update, the search engine is perceptive to these tactics and penalizes them almost immediately. For online businesses, this blow to your site’s visibility can cost you heavily in lost sales.

  Although white-hat SEO is takes more skill, patience and effort than the alternative, it will be sure to keep you in the good books of search engines. What’s more is that when it’s done right, you have your hands on gold for your bottom line.

  Recommended Reading:

  • Why White Hat SEO Works: Content Marketing, UX, and SEO

Conclusion

We hope this crash course on SEO marketing gave you a glimpse into the vast capabilities of the field!

And if you need an SEO agency to do all your work for you while you focus on your business? Well, you’re in luck. BluEnt has you covered with our SEO digital marketing services.

Ready to get started? Contact us now!

Maximum Value. Achieved.