A Guide to SEO Strategy for New Businesses
Whether your new business is online or offline, it is essential that you have a website and a stellar online presence in today's digital world. In recent times there has been a massive surge in online business and enterprise, which is excellent for opportunities but brings with it more competition.
Online competition in almost every sector is fierce these days, so making the most of your online presence is crucial if you want to kick start a new company. It's not enough to have a website; you need to make sure it is effectively optimized for search engines to increase your visibility. There are many working parts in an effective SEO strategy; below are a few of them to help you get started.
Identify Your Best Keywords
SEO is mostly about keyword strategy. You need to identify the best keywords for your product or outsourced business services and utilize them in the most efficient way. There is no point in creating an excellent keyword list if you're not going to make the most of them.
Firstly, conduct keyword research and target keywords that are relevant to your product or service. Your keywords should also have a large enough search volume so that you are targeting a worthwhile audience. For this, you will need to draw on your experience in the business area. Factors such as region, product, and seasonality become important.
Effective keyword research can be conducted using a range of tools, such as Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Google Trends, Answer the Public, and Google Search Console. All of these tools offer a variety of ways to locate relevant keywords, search for the latest trends, and analyze search volume for particular keywords.
Optimize Your Website for Keywords
Major search engines such as Google and Bing use spiders and bots to scan the Internet looking for the highest quality and most relevant content for a product, service, or subject. The algorithms are kept top-secret, but we know they are interested mainly in relevance and quality. To make your website visible to search engines, you will need to optimize your web pages with this in mind – what's called On-Page SEO.
Firstly, ensure that your Page Title is clear and relevant to the content contained on the page. Also, ensure that your title is under 60 characters, so it doesn't get chopped off on the search results page. Secondly, include a Meta Description (short summary of the page content). This Meta Description also needs to be limited to a maximum of 160 characters. Finally, use H1 heading throughout your page and ensure they contain keywords.
Monitor Your Keyword Success
After you've optimized your On-Page SEO with your latest keyword list, chances are you will rank highly on the search engine results page. But that may not last forever. You might find that after a while, you drop down in the rankings for some unknown reason. It's important to keep track of your SEO performance in general.
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Regularly Spot Check your main keywords to check if search engines are still ranking them in the same position; you can check your average position in the Google Search Console, which gives you the average ranking for the website as a whole as well as the performance of various keywords. Rank Trackers, such as STAT, are also useful. Enter your list of keywords and click 'run.' When the program is finished, you will receive the performance of your keywords over a set period of time.
If your keywords are underperformed, there are several things you can do. To make sure that search engines are able to find your site, check robots.txt and site maps – this will be included in a tech audit. A technical SEO audit is a good idea to source the issue. It will give you detailed information on any technical issue that may be affecting your rankings. There are many other troubleshooting options at your disposal. For a better idea of what you have available, check here.
Optimize for User Experience
The user experience of your website has become a key factor in the success of your SEO strategy. Customers have come to expect a slick and easy interface when they visit websites, along with efficient and straightforward payment facilities. There is a very low tolerance now for even the smallest inconvenience, and so your website needs to be on-point.
There is no automatic tool, as yet, to identify the issues of poor user experience on your site. You just have to use the site yourself and base modifications on your personal judgment. It may be useful to perform a little survey or marketing audit with trusted customers to find out what they like and what feels out of line with their expectations.
Other ways to optimize your site include a speed comparison with competitors, which can be done using Crux, understanding how users navigate your site using HotJar, and monitoring customers click behavior with Google Tag Manager. The more information you have, the better you can make use of it. Change your content layout if users find it difficult to navigate, update old blog posts, and ensure all your metatags are relevant to the page and are the right length.
Improve Your Organic Search Results
Paid advertising is excellent if you have a budget and know how to spend it efficiently. Google Ads can help you with this. However, it is still strongly advised to improve your organic search results as much as possible. It will not only teach you the basics of how to compete at the top of the ranking with your near-competitors, but it will also save you precious advertising revenue, both in the short and long term.
Again, there are lots of great ways to do this, including improving your backlinks, writing longer content, and taking advantage of low-hanging opportunities. Backlinks are almost certainly in the top three ranking factors for Google and play an important role in improving your organic result – so work your backlinks. Longer content will help too; it keeps users on your page for longer and allows you to use more relevant keywords.