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Just about every business these days knows that they need a good SEO strategy. With so many people turning to search engines to learn information, if your business isn’t appearing at the top of the results, you’re missing out on a lot of customers. Unfortunately, not every business knows how to do SEO properly.
There are four major pillars to any effective SEO strategy. By learning what these pillars are, and how to best implement them, you can begin your climb up the search rankings and ultimately grow your business. Here’s what you need to know:
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#1 – Keywords
The first pillar you’ll want to focus on are your keywords. A keyword is a word or a group of words that identifies your business, and is likely to be typed into a search engine. For example, if you’re a bakery in New York City, one of your keywords might be “Italian bakery in NYC”.
Of course, there’s more to it than simply thinking up a few words related to your business. If you’re just opening up a bakery in NYC, and you try to ranking highly in search engines for “bakery in NYC”, you’ll likely find yourself up against a lot of competition, all of whom had a head start. Finding the right keywords for your business’s website is about finding the words that strike a good balance between three things: a large volume of searches, related to your business, and low competition.
It will take some time to find the best keywords for your business, but once you do, it’s time to start placing them in the right spots. You’ll want your keywords to appear in your page titles, section heads, in your image tags, and sporadically throughout your pages. When you have control over it, you’ll also want links from other websites to include your keywords within the anchor text.
Websites can have multiple keywords they want to focus on, and the keywords you start using now may not remain the best keywords over time. Take some time to read up on how to best use keywords in your website, and then make sure you keep on top of this practice as you go forward. It’s also a good idea to monitor your competitors to see what keywords they’re using.
#2 – Inbound Links
The next thing you’ll want to look at is inbound links. Search engines, and especially Google, love websites that have other websites linking back to them. To Google, this shows that the website is authoritative, and should therefore be ranked higher. So, to get your website to appear higher in search results, you’ll need to get some other websites to link to it.
There are a few ways you can go about this. For starters, if you’re a local business, try to get listed in local business directories. This is an easy way to score a quick link, and expose your business to the people in your area. Getting added to the major businesses directories is one of the best things you can do for local SEO, so make it a priority.
Another strategy you can try is guest posting. Find a website related to your niche, one that has a blog. Offer to write some content for them on a subject they haven’t covered yet. Within the article, include a link back to your own website. Guest blogging not only gets you a link back to your website, but it also puts your business in front of another website’s audience.
When building links back to your site, it’s important to remember that quality is more important than quantity. Search engines give more importance to links that come from reputable sites – they don’t weigh them all equally. It would be better to get one link from a major publication rather than 10 links from spam websites. If you’re unsure of a website’s authority, a quick test you can do is see if that site appears on the first page of Google when you search for something related to it. If it does, there’s a good chance that Google considers that site reputable, so you should try and get a link from them.
#3 – Social Media
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Third on our list is social media. Social media has become one of the most effective ways to market a business, and it has some direct impacts on SEO. While links from social media accounts do not count as part of your backlinks, getting visitors from social media does help your rankings. Search engines like to see that people are visiting a website, and social media can help you to do this.
Set up accounts on the major social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc – and start using them regularly. Post updates about your business, share useful information you come across, and interact with your followers. Even just checking in on your accounts once or twice a day can go a long way. If you build up a large enough following, you can drive steady traffic to your website, and search engines will give you a boost in return.
#4 – Content is King
The fourth, and final, major pillar to focus on is content. Producing quality content for your website is one of the best things you can do, and will help to boost all other areas of your SEO strategy. Here’s an example of how it can work:
You’re a business that provides productivity software for small business. On your blog you write a post about thirty different ways to keep yourself focused and remain productive. You then share this blog post on your social media accounts, giving your followers useful information, and something they are likely to click on.
The article is so useful that other websites want to use it as a resource. In their own blog articles they start linking to your post, providing you with a useful backlink. Now, as a result, you have more inbound links, and your position in search engines begins to climb.
With all of these backlinks and social shares, Google bumps this article to the top of it’s search results. Now, when someone searches for “How to stay productive at work”, they find your article. This brings in a lot more people to your website, some of whom ultimately turn into customers or visit your Contact Us page. All of this came from one valuable blog post. Imagine what would happen if you kept producing great content?
Giving Your Pillars a Boost
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If you make the above pillars a priority, you should have no trouble doing well with your SEO efforts. However, there are a few other small things you can do to give them a boost.
First, focus on speeding up your website. Websites that take too long to load are penalized by search engines, so either upgrade your server, optimize your WordPress plugins, or get rid of some large images. Slow websites also increase your bounce rate, the next thing you should look at. Try to find ways to keep people on your website longer, such as lightbox popup, or using a chat bot. If you can keep less people from immediately leaving your site, your search engine results will improve as a result.
Finally, focus on your internal linking structure. You want your most important pages to have the most links to it from your other pages. Think of it like a pyramid, with your most important pages and content at the top, and everything below linking to the pages above. A good internal linking structure not only makes it easier for your visitors to get around, but it lets search engines know which of your pages are the most important.
With your pillars in place, and the additional boosts you give them, you should find that your website does pretty well in search results. But SEO is not something you can do once and then forget about it. You need to constantly monitor your SEO efforts and make adjustments as you go along. Doing this will greatly reward your website and business however, so it is well worth the effort.
Author’s Bio:
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
