What if you could get a steady flow of traffic to your small business website? What if without any form of advertising, you could get customers to check out what you have on your site. And what if when they do get to your website, they find relevant content that engages them and leads to nmore of them signing up to do business with you?
SEO MARKETING MADE SIMPLE
What is SEO marketing?
If you’re new to the world of search engine optimization ( SEO) you may be wondering right now what in Jupiter’s name is SEO marketing?
SEO marketing includes all the activities you carry out on your website to make it more visible to customers searching for your services on the internet.
Most times, this usually involves a targeted content promotion geared at getting your website to the first page of Google with the ultimate aim of generating more traffic to your business.
This is different from promoting content through pay per click ads on Google. Pay per click ads as the name implies means that you pay to advertise on Google or other search engines.
What is SEO?
SEO is short for search engine optimization, which is the science of improving your website visibility on the internet to drive online traffic to your business
To make your website more visible on the internet, you’ll need on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. For this article, I won’t go in-depth into all these various forms of SEO. I’ll touch on them briefly so you can understand how they form part of the SEO marketing strategy.
- On-page SEO: this generally refers to how you make your website content more meaningful and engaging to your potential customers. It includes creating a high-quality website copy(essential). It also includes your site architecture and how well each page on your site links to other pages. Proper on-page SEO would require that you create a website that a user can navigate without difficulty.
- Off-page SEO: This includes getting backlinks from other higher authority sites to your website. Backlink building is probably one of the most challenging parts of SEO marketing. It takes creating high-quality content that other websites would find useful. If they find the content on your website engaging and valuable, it’s easier to request a backlink or get them to want to link to your site naturally. There are other ways to get backlinks. Some of these methods are not encouraged by Google.
A good example is buying links from link farms. The danger with this is that you could end up buying weak quality links that do you more harm than if you had no backlinks at all. There’s also the risk of getting penalized by Google.If your website gets sanctioned, you lose all your online traffic. It may take a while to recover from such penalties( that’s if you ever).
- Technical SEO is exactly what the term implies: all the technical bits that improve your search optimization. It includes schema org mark up ( tagging content on your site to make it easier for search engines to understand it). It also includes improving your site speed. There are other, more advanced aspects of technical SEO. You can check this excellent guide to SEO for more information.
How does Google know which results are relevant to search queries
Google uses algorithms, mathematical calculations that tell it which results are relevant to a particular query.
Another example is typing in the word restaurant. Google takes this to mean that you’re most likely looking for a restaurant near you and not the definition of the word ‘restaurant’. The first results you see on your screen reflect that understanding. But just in case what you’re searching for is the definition of the restaurant, Google also throws in a Wikipedia article as you can see on the screen.
How can my website come up on the first page?
This can only be achieved through consistent and qualitative SEO.
How does Google assess my website quality?
If your web visitors cannot understand or browse your web content quickly, they will not spend much time on your site. This may pass the wrong signal to Google that your website is not user-friendly. As a result, your site could get de-ranked or fail to rank on the first page.
Why does my small business even need SEO marketing?
Recent stats show that as much as 70% of your online customers would prefer clicking on an organic result over a paid advertisement on Google.
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They have only a vague idea of what the concept of SEO is and what it can do for their business.
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They want immediate results and are often not patient enough to get the more lasting results from a solid SEO strategy
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They think SEO marketing is either too complicated or too expensive.
To consistently produce content that is optimized for organic rankings, you need to create content that is relevant to your target audience and addresses their challenges by providing the most useful information they can find on that topic. The most effective way is to start a targeted content marketing campaign.
Starting a content marketing campaign
The best and most effective way to get your website to the first page of the search engines is to produce high-quality content consistently. The main objective behind your content marketing should be to satisfy your target users with high-quality material and not just to rank for specific keywords.
How do you start a content marketing campaign?
There are several forms in which your content marketing could take. The ideal would be to combine all kinds of content marketing to achieve a more rounded approach with your seo marketing strategy.
- Starting a company blog is one of the most effective ways to start a content promotion strategy. If you do not have a blog, then it’s high time you got one. Posting relevant content channeled at your target audience is an excellent way to rank higher in the search engines and drive more traffic to your website.
- Starting a newsletter: Newsletter marketing is also another great way to promote content to already subscribed customers. You send emails to inform them of a new and relevant content on your website. The more they engage with the content on your website, the higher your chances of ranking organically for that article.
- Social media marketing: Creating content is one-half of the SEO marketing strategy; having people share it is another ballgame entirely. To get more people to view, interact with, and possibly share what you’ve created, you need to put as much effort into marketing your content.
- Video marketing: This is another SEO marketing strategy that’s guaranteed to give you tremendous results. A lot of people favour watching videos over reading articles. Explainer videos do very well on Youtube. Interestingly, Google may begin to rank video content above written materials because of the high level of user engagement. A robust approach to SEO marketing would involve creating some videos that explain parts of your services or products that users are interested in learning about.
To get more in-depth information on how to start and scale a content promotion strategy, check this article on how to scale content promotion.
SEO marketing doesn’t have to be a drain on your time or financial resources. With the right team and tools, you can get your website to the first page of Google where more customers can find you.
At the articles depot, we help you create the right content for your SEO marketing activities. To inquire about our content SEO services or start a free content strategy chat with us, please click on the BIG BUTTON BELOW.
