Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for all kinds of online businesses today in this competitive digital era to gain greater visibility and engage a targeted audience. To get to the top of the search engine results page, companies are increasingly using numerous marketing techniques, including choosing the right keywords and having engaging content. Lead generation is key to the success of online businesses, and SEO can help get recognition for your brand and help promote your products effectively to your customers.
How can SEO make a difference to your business?
With changing SEO requirements, it may be challenging to keep up with the developments, but online companies need to invest time and effort to get their website on top of the search engine results page. This is because well-optimized sites tend to get higher traffic resulting in increased leads and sales for your business. Organic search has a significant role to play in boosting website performance and helps convert them into potential customers. Thus, SEO helps in improving user experience and increases the trust and credibility of your brand for the customers.
As per the report by Accenture, 94% of B2B buyers prefer to do an online search while making purchases. Thus, businesses that do not leverage the importance of SEO could be missing valuable opportunities to reach their targeted customers. Similarly, reports by Statista indicate global eCommerce to touch $4.5 trillion as we approach 2021 where e-commerce will comprise 17.5% of retail sales. Today the majority of the customers prefer shopping online and use the Internet to gather relevant information about different products and services.
Hence, investing in SEO has become crucial for all online businesses and cannot be overlooked presents plenty of opportunities to tap the local and global market for companies.
6 Essential SEO tips to boost your website rankings
- Focus on proper keyword research
A successful SEO strategy requires good keyword research practices using the right kind of search terms, long-tail keywords, and phrases used by visitors while searching for your products or services. It is not everything about getting more traffic for your website but driving relevant visitors who may convert into your customers. It is good to know if the keywords that you are using will be useful and pertinent to your visitors. There are many ways to find the right keywords, especially using the Google Keyword Planner to target popular keywords and search phrases that visitors commonly use.
- Increase your page loading speed
Page loading speed is one of the key factors taken into consideration by search engines while ranking websites. Generally, websites that are slow and take time to load may distract visitors and they may abandon your site. As per research, 40% of the visitors tend to abandon sites that take more than 3 seconds to load, and 80% of them fail to return to the website in the future. This can hurt your rankings and reduce traffic to your website which can be disastrous to your business.
- Have high-quality content on your website
Search engines focus on providing valuable and relevant content to the website visitors which makes it essential to share informative, engaging, and informative content on your website. Moreover, the keywords used in the content need to be relevant and distributed evenly to look natural. Use engaging headlines, meta descriptions, and URLs that are optimized and help in boosting search engine rankings of your website. It is important to enabling your visitors to keep coming back to your site and increase the dwell time (time visitors spend on your website).
- Choose appropriate keywords
Search engines such as Google are laying increased emphasis on quality and valuable content based on keywords. Use the correct type of keywords in your content and distribute them evenly, especially in your headlines, sub-headlines, URL, meta description etc. In addition, using techniques such as latent semantic indexing or LSI can give a massive boost to your SEO process. LSI is finding related keywords in addition to the main keywords as search engines rely on this process to rank your websites.
- Use internal and external links
Internal links are an integral part of your SEO strategy, and they can help Google to crawl your website and know the hierarchy of your content so that it can distribute the page authority across your website. Thus, internal linking can help make website navigation smooth for visitors while increasing it’s ranking and domain authority. External links enable search engines to evaluate your website and help in relying on quality content to create backlinks for their website rather than spending money to get cheap links
- Make sure your site uses HTTPS
Security has always remained a top priority for Google, so it prefers websites to be on HTTPS. Thus, websites with SSL certificates are considered safe and secure for online visitors since the communication between the server and the browser remains encrypted. Since July 2018 onwards, Google has been marking all sites which do not have SSL as non-secure in its browser. Thus, if a visitor tries to visit such sites, they will be given a warning by the browser that the website is not safe or secure. Hence, all website owners need to buy an SSL certificate from authenticating SSL providers like GlobalSign, AlphaSSL, CheapSSLShop, and DigiCert to meet the guidelines laid down by Google and the CA/B forum to boost their website rankings.
Conclusion
SEO is a long-term strategy, and online businesses need to experiment with different tactics to see what works best for their business. It is also important to remember that compared to alternate methods of boosting website rankings, SEO also works out to be more cost-effective for every business and yield the best results if used in the right manner. The key is to understand the goals of your business and come up with an appropriate SEO plan to get success in your website marketing efforts.
