Having an effective digital marketing and SEO strategy is an essential part of doing business today. Covid has shown just how important the internet has become to individuals and businesses today.
As the pandemic hit the world last year, billions of people were affected in all manner of ways. Lockdowns stopped people from going about their everyday business, and many turned to the internet for help.
Search queries changed a lot during periods of lockdown, and as reported by Moneypenny, UK internet users were interested in home offices and hobbies. They also seemed to be preoccupied with getting cakes and alcohol delivered, according to Google anyway.
The websites that showed up high on the search result pages for these queries would have had very effective SEO which kept them above the competition. If Covid has shown anything to any ecommerce business, it is that competition can only get fiercer.
Why Is Seo Needed For Your Website To Be Effective?
Driving traffic to your business’s website is a crucial part of having a successful online presence. Ecommerce sites need shoppers to arrive just as their brick-and-mortar counterparts do.
Think of traffic on the internet in the same way you might for footfall when it concerns retail outlets, restaurants, bars, and commercial offices such as real estate agents. If no one knows where a shop or restaurant is, then they are less likely to find it. Similarly, if there are no signs pointing toward your website then it may as well be invisible, or not exist at all.
When someone searches for a query, say golf carts in Florida, they will get pages returned to them with the most appropriate results. Those at the top of the list will have websites that Google or Bing deem most appropriate to the query that was asked. And this will be
One of the most important ways to rank highly on results pages is to have effective search engine optimization. Carry on below to see how you could develop your business’s SEO.
Which Ranking Factors Are The Most Important To SEO?
If you are wondering how your site gets added to search results, then here is a very simple explanation.
Google crawls the internet and looks for websites using code which it calls spiders. When these sites are found, any optimized pages are then entered into the search engine’s index. When a user performs a search, any appropriate pages are pulled from the index and displayed.
Google, in particular, looks for a variety of things:
- User experience or UX
- Mobile-friendly site
- Content
- Keywords and phrases
- Links and backlinks
- Social media
- Local SEO
- How old the domain is
- Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness
- Optimization
- Technical SEO
Google started to rank the overall user experience this year with a new metric called Core Web Vitals. This tries to measure how good the UX is by evaluating loading speeds, initial interaction time, and layout shifts.
You can read more about the other SEO areas below.
Keywords And Phrases Are Still Required
When someone initiates a query through a search engine, its index is scoured for the most relevant websites. For this to happen, keywords and phrases need to be relevant.
This means that if someone is searching for golf carts in Florida, and you happen to be in this business, you need to have these keywords on your website.
To use keywords and phrases effectively it is necessary to research them. This means looking at relevant topics and words surrounding your business. Fortunately, there are many SEO tools available to help with this.
You Will Need High Quality, Optimized Content
Content is, was, and will perhaps always be, king. There is a lot of discussion about keywords being irrelevant these days, and content not being so important either. No matter if there is some truth in this, content is still vital to SEO.
Websites that concentrate on keyword stuffing, or are thin on content, will fare badly on SERPs. Similarly, a website that has lots of content that is irrelevant will also perform badly.
Content should be of high quality, be relevant, and be up-to-date. Longer blogs are better too. Different experts recommend a variety of lengths when it comes to content, but the more words the better, as long as it is on topic and accurate.
You might want to look at what SEO content writing services could do for your business, especially if you don’t want to be writing blogs yourself. Professional content writers can boost the value of your website.
You Need Links To Connect
There are three kinds of links you need to worry about. Internal links, outbound links, and backlinks or inbound links.
All of these links are crucial to SEO. There is a fourth type of link, dead links, and these you should fix as soon as you notice them.
Internal links can be used to push search engine results of other pages as they link to your content.
Outbound links should ideally be headed to relevant authoritative websites that show your visitors that your content is of good quality.
Backlinks are very important to SEO. The more you have of these coming from high-quality trusted authorities, the better. This is a good reason to write content for other websites so you can link back to your own.
Social Media Is Important These Days
While much of Facebook and Instagram is about messaging friends and checking out what others are doing, they can be very useful tools to a business too.
Social media is a highly useful part of your whole digital marketing strategy if used correctly. Google has stated that social media signals do not count on search engine results, but anyone involved in SEO will still recommend you have a social media presence.
Any pages you have on social media, along with posts from other people, and shares mean a higher chance of traffic to your websites. It will also increase your chances of backlinks being generated organically.
Consider Using An SEO Expert
If you are looking to improve your website’s performance and use effective SEO, then the best way is probably through an expert.
The advice above barely scratches the surface of what is needed for good SEO. It is unlikely that you have time to perform an SEO audit, build a strategy, and then carry out the work necessary. This is especially valid if you are running a company at the same time. In which case you will need to hire an expert.
A professional SEO expert won’t just do the things above, they will carry out much more. They will dive deep into technical SEO, optimize every element including videos and images, and make your website work to its best ability.
Summary
If you want to do effective SEO then you will need to perform a full audit to discover where your site is failing, and where it is working well. Then there are many areas to work on. You will need to build up links, optimize and add content, and look at local SEO and your business information.
There is much more to improving the SEO of a website than just adding in some new keywords, and you might need an agency or a freelancer to come in and show you the way.
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