SEO

Top Five Fail-Proof Basic SEO Strategies

As an online business just dipping its toes in online marketing, you may underestimate just how much sway SEO holds for your website to start attracting customers and gaining online visibility. For an online business or company, SEO is equivalent to oxygen for you. Therefore, it is essential that you learn some fail-proof SEO strategies so that your website can join the competition of achieving the highest SERP ranks and start generating leads.

You can look up “SEO strategies for businesses” and you’ll be immediately bombarded with hundreds of strategies and techniques that you can employ, however, it is important that you get the basics right before jumping to the advanced stuff. The basic SEO practices enable you to lay out the groundwork for your website to gain online visibility attract prospective customers and develop your business prospects.

Five Essential Basic SEO Strategies That You Can’t-Miss

It is crucial to understand the importance of basic SEO strategies to move on to advanced ones. The basic ones focus on the organic aspect of your SEO which relates to unpaid optimization practices.

While ads and social media marketing do contribute a lot to developing your business by generating customer leads, you start building the framework for gaining visibility and attracting traffic through basic SEO practices. Here are five basic SEO strategies you can follow to begin increasing the ranking of your website:

1.    Producing Quality Content

Whether it is an online business that provides HR services or a small company that sells skincare products, content is the bread and butter for them all. Aside from the product or services, it is the content that attracts online traffic to a website. When it comes to online content, focusing on quality instead of quantity is the best approach to take. You can take the “promotional+informative” approach to create content for your website.

It is important to find the right keywords and the right audience base to create your content around, be engaging, educational, and relevant to your business, and optimize its headers, title tags, and length to rank it better. As long as your content is well-researched and follows a healthy balance between educating and promoting, you’ll be good to go. 

2.    Selecting the Right Keywords

When it comes to SEO, content and keywords share a very close relationship. The keywords that you choose to target can make or break an SEO strategy. The worth of a keyword depends on its search volume. When it comes to selecting the keywords, aim for short and mid-tail keywords with low to moderate difficulty.

Before you choose a keyword, you can check its difficulty, search volume, and overall potential by using several free tools online. These tools also provide you with keyword variations and relevant keywords to provide you with options. With this insight, you can select the right keywords to develop your content around.

3.    Creating Content That Aligns With Search Intent

Your content will only be valuable if it aligns with the search intent of users online. Search or user intent is what motivates a search query. All the pages that rank on a Google SERP have all been successful in passing Google’s test for search intent. For example, the top results for “how to apply sunscreen” will have articles and tutorials about how to apply sunscreen and not pages that sell sunscreen.

However, search results for “best sunscreen online” will have eCommerce pages that sell sunscreen because Google will know that people want to buy sunscreen and not learn how to use it. Therefore, it is important that the content you put out aligns with the search intent of your prospective customers to rank high on SERPS. Otherwise, Google is likely to mark it irrelevant and move past it after awarding it a low rank.

4.    Improving Your Page Speed

Let’s be honest. If a website is taking too long to load, you are likely to get frustrated and click off. Your prospective customers are also likely to do the same with your website if its pages are glitchy or take ages to load properly. Even if the text on your website loads but the images don’t, it still provides a professional impression of your business to the prospective customers visiting your website.

Websites with low loading speed get low rankings from Google since it prioritizes user experience when ranking websites. You can use various free tools available online to check the speed of your pages. Some good tools for checking and improving page speed include Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Semrush, and GTMetrix. It’s important that you’re diligent in checking every page’s speed on your site to ensure that Google doesn’t rank it low for bad user experience.

5.    Enhancing The User Experience

One of the most important features of a website that Google keeps a diligent eye on and SEO focuses on is the user experience and engagement. The first user engagement experience of a prospective customer visiting your website decides whether or not they are going to convert. Here are some SEO practices that you can follow to ensure a good user experience for your website:

• Use subheadings properly: Filling out your (H1, H2, H3) for the pages of your website makes the content in them more accessible to the users and helps Google rank them better.
• Don’t use pop-ups: Not only do the visitors to your website may hate intrusive pop-ups, but using them on a website is penalized by Google itself. If you must, you can use them sparingly.
• Optimize your website for mobile view: Mobile optimization is now a major factor that Google considers when ranking a website. By optimizing your website for mobile view, you also increase your audience base as well.
• Add visuals to your content: Having plain long text on your website can take down its user-engagement rate. By adding visuals such as images, videos, and infographics, your visitors can understand your content more effectively.

SEO Your Way To High SERP Rankings

The above-outlined SEO practices are a fail-proof point to start the race to achieving high search rankings and increased online traffic for your website if your website has zero visitors. It is essential that you understand just how tough the competition for the ranks on the first page of Google is.

After you have employed the basic SEO strategies on your website, you can speed up to the latest SEO practices to become a strong player in the competition. At Search Boosters, you can count on us to take care of it all for you. Get in touch now to equip your website with advanced solution-centric SEO strategies to attract online traffic and increase your sales.

SEO, SMM, And SEM: The Three Digital Marketing Tiers

When diving into the world of digital marketing to develop your business, there are some essential marketing channels that you should familiarize yourself with. Even if you choose a digital marketing agency to handle your online marketing, understanding the basic marketing channels, their strategies and lead generation potential can help you remain on top of things.

Digital marketing is multi-faceted. This is why learning about the basic marketing channels such as SEO, SMM, and SEM can help you increase your online traffic, improve your website’s SERP ranking, encourage visitor engagement, and generate strong leads for your business to grow exponentially.

The Three Main Digital Marketing Channels

In the world of digital marketing, SEO, SMM, and SEM are the most famous marketing channels, and for good reason too. Due to their targetability and ROI potential, they are crucial to developing any online business or company. But how do you know which one will work for you? Well first, you must start by understanding how each channel works.

1. SEO — Search Engine Optimization

Perhaps the most famous one, SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of acquiring organic (free) traffic to a website from the search engine result pages. With SEO, you optimize your website with various optimization techniques so it can rank for relevant keywords whenever someone makes a search query related to them. If your website is equipped with excellent SEO strategies, it will appear in the highest ranks on a SERP because of the positive relationship it may share with the search engine’s algorithm.

2. SMM — Social Media Marketing

SMM or social media marketing is the second biggest marketing channel since it targets the enormous audience base that resides on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Social Media Marketing is said to be the center point of e-commerce and brand engagement for large demographics because consumers interact with businesses and with each other on these social networks.

For a business to acquire customers online, it must have a social media presence that mirrors its credibility with its website. By posting regular promotional content, running ads, and interacting with customers on social networks, a business can engage large crowds of prospective customers and build credibility and brand image simultaneously.

3. SEM — Search Engine Marketing

SEM or search engine marketing is often confused with SEO since they both focus on traffic outreach on search engines. But, while SEO deals with organic traffic acquisition, SEM focuses on online advertising done via paid ad campaigns. When you look up a term on Google, the first four search results will have a small green tab that says “ad” under the search title.

This is SEM or paid advertising in its active form, which means a brand paid Google to showcase their ads for that keyword you searched for. SEM is highly customizable when it comes to selecting the targeting features for paid ads. On Google Adwords, you can select a demographic type, location, preferences, etc to increase the targeting potential of your ads.

Basic Practices and Components of SEO, SMM, And SEM

Now that we have cleared what each acronym stands for, we can move forward with some of the most common marketing practices and components for SEO, SMM, and SEM. Some essential practices and components for each marketing channel are:

SEO

First, let’s begin with SEO. Almost all SEO practices focus on improving your website and increasing its online visibility. Here are some common SEO practices and components:

On-Page SEO (on-site optimization of the front-end and back-end of a website)

• Relevant and engaging content
• Easy navigation
• Mobile-optimization
• Image optimization
• Website usability and accessibility
• Page speed and navigation
• Internal linking
• Meta descriptions and headers 1,2, and 3 optimization

Off-Page SEO (off-site optimization of the external sources outside the website)

• Backlinks
• Brand mentions
• Influencer outreach
• Social bookmarking
• Fixing broken links
• Social networking
• Forum Engagement
• Guest author blogging

SMM

SMM is both paid and free, it all depends on the practices and components you choose to use in your campaign. Here are some common ones:

• Organic posts: Free posts that can be created and shared on a business’ social media.
• Ads: Similar to paid ads on SEM, social media ads can be customized and curated to meet target goals such as customer engagement, page likes, the website directs, etc.
• Boosted posts: Also known as sponsored posts, boosted posts are used to increase the post-performance of an ad or a normal post.
• Social networking: Posts that are created with the collaboration of two or more businesses to reach each other’s social media audience bases.

SEM

Lastly, paid advertising on SEM deals with targeting specific audience groups with specific intents. Here are the many components and methods of SEM targeting:

• Remarketing: Also known as retargeting, these are serving ads that are created using the previous search data of customers.
• Geotargeting: These ads are targeted to users that meet the location qualification of the ad.
• PPC: ads that cost a certain amount when a user clicks on them.
• PPI (pay-per-impression): ads that cost a certain amount when a user “views” them.

Which Digital Marketing Channel Should You Invest In?

It is important to understand that there is no “which is better?” when it comes to SEO, SMM, and SEM. All the mentioned practices and components are equally important and necessary if you want to build an online presence, gain visibility, increase your website traffic, and eventually build a customer base. Some factors that you should consider when using these marketing channels are:

Budget

If you want results from your digital marketing campaigns, you need to set aside a budget of how much are you willing to spend. If you are a start-up business and still trying to find what works for you, you may not want to squander all your marketing budget on campaigns without even understanding how they work and their potential. First, you need to understand the marketing channel you selected, the competition market, and the practices that will work best for your business objectives, and then invest in a campaign.

Long And Short-Term Plans

The best SEO practices in 2022 have long-term benefits while paid marketing will be beneficial for you until you keep paying for them. The best approach may be finding a middle point and distributing your time, effort, and money equally between the marketing channels you use. In a general scenario, first setting up various basic SEO strategies and then investing in paid marketing as you wait for them to be lucrative would be ideal. It all depends on deciding on your business objectives and then molding your marketing channels to accomplish them.

Quantity And Quality

Investing in a single marketing channel is as equally bad as creating multiple campaigns at the same time without testing them or doing market research. You may want to tread lightly and carefully so you don’t waste either your money, efforts, or time. Testing strategies out and then deciding to invest in them is a lengthy but wise choice.

Choose A Digital Marketing Agency To Manage All Three

If all this seems too overwhelming for you, you can leave it all in the hands of professionals. You can simply use a digital marketing agency’s services to learn more or curate a custom digital marketing plan for you. Get in touch with Search Boosters now and learn more about how we can manage it all for you.