Search engines are the primary method for navigating the internet for almost every business – from service providers to products & information.
Other marketing techniques such as social media and email marketing can also be successful for generating traffic. However, websites such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing are the major drivers in this area. Most of the visits to your site coming from these search engines, Google in particular.
Search engines are rare in that they provide targeted traffic to your website as it is people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the middle-men in this process of making things happen on your site. If search engines cannot find your site you will miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your website.
SEO can be complex, however there’s a vast amount of information available online which allows people to easily understand the basics.
The knowledge gained will let you understand the importance of having an effective SEO plan being put into place on your website.
Below are the top three tips with regards to SEO:
Know your audience and what they are looking for.
SEO and online marketing is about connecting with customers. In order to target your customers you need to know which sort of people will be looking to buy your products or services and what they are looking for when they type in their search criteria.
Understanding who your customers are the key to any marketing activity. Your initial assumptions may be accurate to who your audience is, but that is not always correct. You may also be missing vital things that could drive more traffic to your website. You could also be losing out on potential messaging opportunities or new market segments. This is why this step is one of the most important aspects of a strong marketing campaign.
Doing research at the start of the SEO process is invaluable.
Keywords, topics and phrases that are being used in your industry and you would also like to rank for should be noted and it’s very beneficial to reflect these keywords and topics within your website content. This helps to advertise with the right search engines and measure which content is performing best on each channel.
Once you identify the audience, it is now time to find out exactly why someone might search for your content. This will help in finding something that fully connects with your target audience, and find the appropriate keywords for your audience.
Track your progress.
It’s important to track the success of the keywords that you are using on a regular basis so that you know what is working and what’s not.
It’s also important to keep an eye on what your competition is doing. Any changes to the keywords that your competitors are using, could usually mean an increase in their marketing efforts. A more unlikely situation is that they are going to introduce a new product to compete with yours.
Make adjustments and optimise.
Once an SEO has successfully been implemented to your website and progress is being tracked, you will now know what has been working well for your target audience and what has not. It is important now to make time for adjustments so that your SEO can become even more successful.
Another possibility is to identify more specific keywords for your targeted audience group and narrow down marketing efforts based on what your audience best responds to.
It is important that you take mobile content into consideration during the process. People will have different behaviours when searching on a mobile device as opposed to that on a desktop computer.
Made In Scotland can help optimise your website using SEO to rank higher on search engines. This is the best way to organically start moving up the results page. For more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!