7 SEO Tips to Grow your Business

Your prospective customers are searching the internet every day for stories, advice, and information. Whenever they are doing this, you want to ensure your website appears on the top of the search results. You need to make sure that you optimize your website for search if you are not doing so already.  

The following are 7 ways that SEO services can help you save money, maximize ROI and drive organic traffic.

1. Cumulative growth is created by SEO

The slow-burn effects of SEO provide much better long-term benefits compared to PPC. A PPC campaign produces leads fast, but as soon as you stop investing in your campaign, your leads start to dry up. SEO, on the other hand, is sticky. When you have optimized content it can stay for a long time on the front page (depending on what the keyword is).

Spending money on SEO currently will add a small return right away. However, as time passes, the mone you spend will continue to endure without having to invest more. Your optimized content can stay online, and earn its value back (and more) over time.

2. Content must stay up-to-date

After holding a front-page listing on a specific keyword, it can be expected that you can hold the position for a while. However, as time passes, a lot of your content will end up going out of date. Then you will need to conduct an audit in order to ensure that your content stays relevant and your growth continues to hold steady.  

Content can often be updated with new images, references, and stats. Although some you might need to be saved – so you do need to be prepared to entirely delete some old blog posts.

3. SEO involves a complete funnel

There are some marketers who believe that if they are ranking of their own brand name already they don’t need to make an investment in organic search. However, that is not true.

The whole sales funnel is captured by SEO – not only people who are at the bottom you are directly searching for your brand name. By blogging about a broad range of subjects surrounding your service or product, you can capture those customers who are at the top of the funnel who are just conducting research on Google. If a customer is not familiar with your brand, they will after they read your blog.

In addition, make sure you have your systems in place in order to engage visitors who land on your website. What we recommend you do is to track visitor activities using the Autopilot tracking code.

4. Avoid getting penalized   

It is important to be aware of search engine penalties, even if you don’t invest at all in SEO. Algorithms are designed by search engines to punish websites that attempt to game the system. Those bad actors manipulate the search results deliberately for their own advantage.

If your website is online, then the search engines crawl it whether you want them to or not. So that is why it is worthwhile to be familiar with what you should do and not do, so you don’t end up getting penalized accidentally.

Whether you are a first-time or SEO master, be sure that you do not:  

Create duplicate content that is on multiple pages and is exactly the same

Have low-security protocols which make your website vulnerable to being hacked

Have unrelated link exchanges appearing on your website

Have an excessive amount of user-generated input that dilutes your content  

5. There are many side benefits

Since external forces such as Google’s algorithm are relied on by SEO, it might feel kind of like gambling. However, it isn’t – there are many side benefits that come with knowing how to work best with the search engine algorithms.

A few of those include the following:

Keyword research is market research as well. Conduct keyword research to find out what questions, products, and tops your customers and competitors have an interest in.

Link building captures referral traffic and spreads brand awareness.

When content is produced for the search engines it is not only for SEO purposes. Your content can be repurposed for general content marketing, lead nurture journeys, relationship marketing, and list building.

6. The search performance of your competitors is just as important as yours is.

No one wants their competitors to beat them. Monitoring the search activity of your competitors is a good idea in order to help guide your own search strategy. You won’t get exact figures from this, but it will provide you with valuable insights about your market.

The search performance of your competitors can be estimated by using a research tool such as SEMrush. That will provide you with a good idea of the amount of traffic that is being generated by your competitors on specific keywords, in addition to the financial value of your traffic.

7. Your user experience will be improved by following SEO best practices.

SEO gurus constantly adjust their strategies in order to align better with Google’s latest changes.

We can never really know what exactly they are up to at Google headquarters. However, we do know that the search engine has been making significant efforts to put an emphasis on signals that relate to engagement.

Metrics such as total time on the site, load speed, total pages that are viewed per session, and dwell time all are becoming increasingly important. Blogging can only improve these metrics so much. That is why SEO has gone beyond only internal links and keywords.

Improving the user’s overall experience means making improvements to your own Google position. Websites with higher rankings earn their positions through implementing:

Content that is optimized for rich snippet and schema enhancements

Design thinking

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

Accelerated Mobile Pages and mobile responsive design (in response to its new mobile-first index)

Google is focused on user experience in order to push the best websites up to the top of its list. That has resulted in SEO becoming more engrained more than ever before into digital marketing.
Organic search is the channel that is frequently the first contact point for customers. It is the catalyst for igniting engagement and driving traffic. Your digital marketing strategies will definitely be incomplete without it.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.