Finding customers is one of the top challenges that young entrepreneurs face around the world. But most of them don’t know that there exists a “Holy Grail” that can keep on bringing customers for their business. SEO is (not a) hidden artifact that can turn your business into a success in no time.
SEO, short for “Search Engine Optimization,” is a proven strategy that has three main goals:
- Building an audience.
- Making you discoverable.
- Turning prospects into customers.
You will learn the secrets an SEO Link Building Agency uses for bringing attention and customers for a new and established business, so keep on reading!
Before We Get Started
SEO is so crucial for businesses that even the US government has set up an online resource for SEO. What other proof do you need for understanding the importance of SEO? Put your smartphone to the silent mode, lower the TV volume and get away from any other distraction for getting the most out of this guide.
Your Competitors: Learn From Them
Being new to the business forces new entrepreneurs to generate new ideas and come up with outstanding strategies. However, it doesn’t mean that you should neglect the success of your competitors. When it comes to SEO, you can learn a ton from your competitors.
These steps will show you how you can unearth the SEO tactics of your competitors:
- Explore their seo content marketing strategy.
- Figure out how they behave on social media.
- Understand what makes them engage their audience.
- Take a closer look at the User Interface of their website.
- Analyze what conversion techniques are working for them.
The Base: What Your Audience Wants?
You should know that people only consider themselves, and it’s not that bad at all. Being an entrepreneur, if you understand what your audience is looking for, you have a better chance of providing them with the best products and services. Learning this is important both from a marketing and SEO point of view.
Here’s how you can uncover what your audience wants using the SEO practices:
- Search for the main query in your target audience.
- Find out what social accounts are prevalent in your target industry.
- Locate what websites are ranking against the main keywords (more on keywords later).
You can use the HubSpot Persona Generator to find out your ideal customer and how you can serve them better.
Power Of Proper Keyword Research
Keywords, like the name, are words that your prospects enter in search engines for finding relevant content. Ranking against all-important keywords in your industry means that you get thousands of hits every day – and you’ll convert the visitors into customers if you’ve set up things the right way!
These tips can help you find the right keywords that’ll help you rank higher on search engines:
- Get the free trial of paid keyword discovery tools like Moz.
- Hop onto the Google Keyword Planner for finding relevant keywords.
- Check “Google Search Predictions” to find what is relevant to your target queries.
- Keep on updating your keyword findings so you can stay on top of all search results.
Many SEO pros and entrepreneurs overlook that there is a difference between keyword research for search engines and social media keyword research. WordStream has published a great resource that explains what can help you find keywords for social media.
Your Expectations With Keywords
Keywords, keywords, keywords! Whenever someone turns to SEO, the first thing they discover is coming up with a keyword strategy. No doubt you can’t think about getting featured on search results without having an excellent keyword plan, but putting all your eggs (efforts) in the “Keywords” basket is not going to help.
Here’s what you should avoid when it comes to keywords:
- Don’t stuff keywords in all the posts you publish.
- Avoid sticking to the same set of keywords.
- Refrain yourself from spending too much time on LSI keywords.
- Don’t buy all the keywords-finding tools when you are starting.
Main Takeaway: Forget about getting thousands of hits from your keyword efforts.
Smart Content Marketing
There is no doubt people across all industries love getting free informational advice. For example, if you are selling makeup products, your prospects will love reading makeup tutorials on your blog. Getting the idea? Content marketing is creating free and valuable content optimized for your target audience.
- Locate the short keywords that your audience searches all the time.
- Use the tools mentioned above and find long-term keywords in your industry.
- Go on the spree of creating super readable and detailed content around these topics.
There are various strategies that experts have used successfully in the past for producing excellent content marketing strategies. As mentioned earlier, using “Trial and error” will not help you grow in the fast-paced world of SEO. Check out this detailed content marketing guide and start developing a solid strategy.
Link Building
When it comes to ranking websites on top of search results, search engines prefer websites renowned in the industry. And this is where link building tools kick in. Link Building includes strategies that bring more inbound links to your website. So, in essence, more backlinks = more authority = higher rankings on SERPs.
The two most prominent ways of building links to your website are:
- Blogger Outreach
- Guest Posting
Here is a brief overview of both these strategies.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger Outreach is contacting authoritative blogs and asking them to feature your website on their blog or sharing your content. Without getting into more details, here are some points entrepreneurs can follow for maximizing their blogger outreach returns:
- Find only the authoritative blogger using tools like AllTop and BuzzSumo.
- Take your time and understand their target audience demands from them.
- Don’t overlook the importance of building connections with bloggers.
- Come up with an outstanding email that shows you’re serious about your business.
You might have to do a lot of research before you see any promising replies from bloggers. But, if you do some hard work, you can see huge spikes in the traffic on your blog.
Guest Posting
All top blogs in the industry are always on the lookout for quality content. You can fulfill the need of their audience and increase the number of authoritative backlinks, all with Guest posting. Some entrepreneurs understand the importance of guest posting and contact bloggers and end up with rejection.
Here’s what to do for getting your guest posts accepted across all top blogs:
- Don’t make a single mistake while reading the contribution guidelines.
- Only write content that is helpful for the audience of the blog you are targeting.
- Understand the importance of building relations with bloggers via blog comments.
- Follow your target blogs on their socials and stay engaged with them.
- Write a quality outreach email and give them a reason for publishing your post.
- Pitch them at least three ideas so they have more room for analyzing your creativity.
Create An Outstanding Sitemap
Easing the business process is essential for making a startup successful. Similarly, if you are focusing on improving your website’s visibility, you will need a great sitemap for your website. A sitemap will help your website get more attention from search engines.
Follow these tips for creating a website hierarchy that will make your website credible:
- Pick which pages on your website will be primary pages.
- Make some room for the secondary or dropdown pages.
- Plan all things keeping the expansion of content in your view.
- Follow a URL structure plan that works well with all the pages.
- Use the Top, Footer, and Sidebar menus to set up a hierarchy.
Eliminating Hardly Visited Pages
If you had set up your website a long time ago, there might be several pages on your website that you don’t need anymore. Pages like a promotional page you set up like a long time ago. Do these pages serve any purpose? Absolutely not. Doing this will decrease the burden on your website. But, in case you decide on deleting a page, make sure that you are creating a proper 301 redirect.
Utilizing On-Page SEO
Even if you have the best people coming up with the most authoritative content, you will still not climb up the search rankings if you are not caring about On-Page SEO. Do this one thing wrong, and all of your efforts will go in vain.
These are the essential On-Page SEO practices:
- Optimize all content you publish on your website for SEO.
- Make sure that the tile and description tags are appropriate.
- Follow proven techniques for increasing the CTR on your blogs.
Apart from On-Page SEO, if you are willing to optimize your website for the best results, it’s better to have a dedicated team handle your SEO needs.
Image SEO
All entrepreneurs upload images on their business websites because they know the importance of publishing images and their impact on the audience. However, have you ever thought about how you can use images to increase your website’s visibility? This is where Image SEO comes into play.
Following these tips can improve the Image SEO on your business website:
- Only upload photos in PNG or WEBP format.
- Compress the size of your images.
- Try using only the unique images.
- Insert keywords in the image file names.
- Come up with SEO-Friendly Alt text.
- Include the images in your website’s sitemap.
Importance Of Local SEO
So someone in your area hops on the internet to find a service that you provide. Being an entrepreneur, it’s your utmost desire that they get their stuff done from you. But how are they going to choose your services if your business website never appears before them? Local SEO pushes your business to the people in your area.
The topic of Local SEO is very vast, but you must follow these essentials at all costs:
- Set up your “Google My Business” account
- Make sure that your Bing Maps profile is set up
- Follow the basics of NAP consistency
- Use tools like Screaming Frog for tracking your citations
Managing A Content Repository
Staying up with the trends is necessary for promoting your business. But at the same time, it is also essential that you have content created around basics as well. And what about the unique image of your brand. Doing all of this might seem like something hectic, but a Content Repository can help you with this:
- Stay frequent on social platforms and find what people are discussing.
- Keep a closer eye on your competitors and check the topics they are covering.
- Get back to the basics and weave them with trends for creating a unique brand voice.
Building A Great Website
So far, you’ve learned about what it takes to optimize your website, so people and search engines equally like it. But, many budding entrepreneurs can forget building a website that is both up to the design standards and keeps the readers engaged.
Here’s what to do for building a great website:
- Focus on creating a great home page.
- Have a visible CTA on your website.
- Think about coming up with an excellent design.
- Make sure that your CMS is robust and can handle massive traffic.
- Follow the basics of a smart marketing strategy.
- Make sure that all your site metrics are up to the mark.
User-Friendly Website
As mentioned earlier, people get too stuck with the keyword idea that they forget about the “human” aspect of marketing. There was a time when search engines couldn’t differentiate between a keyword-stuffed and quality webpage. Fast forward to this day; search engines crush pages that provide no value.
Which leads towards keeping the website user-friendly.
Remember that even if you have implemented all the SEO tactics on your website, people will still show reluctance towards your website if you are not providing them a valuable product or service. Here’s how you can ensure user-friendliness even while following the proven SEO standards:
- Ensure that your headlines contain keywords.
- Show the keywords in bold on your website.
- Build a solid internal linking structure.
- Incorporate bullet points in your blogs.
- Put keywords in Meta Titles.
- Optimize CTA links for SEO.
Creating Quality Blogs
You’ve heard “Content is king” more than you could imagine. But, to be honest, publishing tons of content on your website that is no one willing to read is never going to help you. Understanding the type of content your audience wants to read is useless and will destroy people’s trust in your brand.
Read these tips for creating quality content:
- Make your content super readable.
- Include bullet points in your content.
- Come up with topics that are popular with people.
- Prefer long-form content over short-form content.
- Write content that people will love to read in the first place.
Now, if you have a flair for writing and want to learn more about SEO and content, you should try writing the content yourself. But on the contrary, if you are willing to get better results without spending lots of time, you should start working with SEO content for coming up with content.
Video SEO
Admit it; people are now more willing to watch videos instead of reading content. It’s not like content is useless nowadays, but using the power of videos is essential. How can you use videos for driving more traffic and building an audience? Here are some actionable tips for entrepreneurs:
- Start learning about YouTube SEO.
- Make relevant videos for your audience.
- Keep yourself updated about video trends.
- Talk about the trendy topics in your industry.
- Start using the YouTube Studio for advanced statistics.
Track Your Progress
So you have made your way to the end of this blog, and you are ready to implement all the techniques you have learned. But, it will be useless if you don’t know what good all your efforts have brought to your business, right? Luckily you don’t have to stay in the dark about your SEO efforts.
Here are some techniques if you want to track your SEO success:
- Set up your Google Analytics account.
- Check the conversion rate of your audience.
- Learn how many people check all your blog pages.
- Find out how much time people spent on your website.
SEO: Frequently Asked Questions:
Q. Can I rank Number 1 on SERPs in one month?
A. It depends; there is no concrete answer for all businesses.
Q. Do I need to hire an SEO agency?
A. Yes, if you are looking for professional help and quick results.
Q. Can I learn SEO on my own?
A. Yes, if you have the time and resources.
Q. What is the optimal length of content/blog posts?
A. Generally speaking, both users and search engines love long-form content.
Conclusion
Contrary to the newbie belief, SEO is not dead. You can still have scalable results if you use SEO the right way. All of the tips mentioned above can help you build an audience and convert more prospects to customers. As a beginner, you can choose the route of learning SEO on your own, but the best thing for your business is hiring an SEO agency.
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