There are many tasks involved in growing your business, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important. SEO is the foundation of modern marketing since most people search for products and services online even when they plan to visit a business in person. To compete in any industry, your online presence needs to be visible in the search engines.
Whether you already have an SEO campaign or you’re just starting out, here are several tips for using SEO to grow your business.
1. Consult With A Professional SEO Expert
The fastest way to grow your business with SEO is to consult with an expert. Not only do experts have inside knowledge, but they also have the experience required to get top-notch results. If you try to do SEO on your own, it’s possible, but you’ll have to go through a long learning curve and make many mistakes before you’ll be successful. In the process, you’ll waste time, money, and energy.
SEO doesn’t produce results overnight, but working with a pro will get you results faster than if you try to learn it all from scratch. An SEO professional will create a customized plan based on a site analysis that shows where you currently stand. Your SEO pro will identify opportunities for improvement, like technical issues that need to be fixed, and ways to improve your backlink profile.
There are many nuances to SEO that you won’t pick up in DIY YouTube videos, so reach out to a local optimization pro for help.
2. Focus On Generating Inbound Links For Traffic
There are two reasons to build links: search rankings and traffic. Most people focus on the former and forget about the latter, but both are equally important.
Inbound links, also called backlinks, are a primary factor in search engine rankings. Backlinks tell search engines your content is valuable, useful, and credible. The more you have, the better those linked pages will rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s hard, if not impossible, to rank a website without backlinks unless it’s a niche with little to no competition. For most businesses, backlinks are essential.
While inbound links signal your value to search engines, they also give users the opportunity to explore your website. If you only build backlinks to get ranked higher in the SERPs, you’ll miss out on a ton of traffic, which means missed sales and leads.
If you haven’t already, start building backlinks to generate traffic. A simple way to do this is to start writing guest posts for blogs related to your niche and tailor your anchor text to invite people to click. Just make sure the content on your target pages provides value. If you’re reaching the right audience, they’ll be more likely to sign up for your email list or buy a product from your website. A well-written article published on a credible, relevant blog has the potential to bring you a steady stream of traffic for many years to come.
3. Use SEO To Capture Leads
Growing a business requires generating leads on a regular basis, and you can do this with SEO by ranking web pages designed to capture leads or generate sales.
The primary method is to target transactional keywords, also known as “buying keywords.” These are search terms like “buy new tires near me” or “iPod price.” Both of these terms indicate the user is ready to buy the product they’re searching for. Other transactional words users search for include ‘purchase,’ ‘benefits,’ and ‘solution.’
While you’re implementing your usual SEO, be sure to optimize your sales and lead-capturing pages to ensure you’re getting ranked for the terms people use when they’re ready to pull out their credit card and buy.
4. Optimize All Pages With Valuable Content
Organic traffic is necessary to grow your business. Strong SEO will bring you a daily flow of organic traffic from search engines, so the more of your content that ranks, the more chances you have to get those visitors.
You don’t need to rank every single web page on your site, but it is helpful to rank pages with valuable content. Say you have 100 pages on your site. Getting each one of those to the top of the SERPs for relevant search terms will give you 100 chances to generate traffic. The more pages that rank, the better.
Build A Strong SEO Foundation For Your Business
Today’s business owners rely on digital marketing to generate most of their revenue, and search engines are a main source of leads. When you build a steady flow of traffic using SEO, you’ll have an easier time growing your business.