Pay per click (PPC) advertising and social media resources are an important tool to help give your business brand, engage your audience, and increase your revenue. However, these should not make you lose sight of the importance of SEO.
The long-term return on investment (ROI) from a solid SEO strategy is far greater than any of these, and successfully ranking higher on search engines adds an enormous amount of credibility to your business.
With less than 10% of browsers going past the first page of search results, it’s no surprise that growing an organic presence through SEO is a priority for the majority of marketers and businesses. Below we’ll take a look at some tools that can help you achieve this without breaking the bank.
Content is Still King
Despite the rise of mobile use and voice searches, having relevant high-quality content is still one of the biggest factors in your ranking. It’s equally important that your content is optimized for the search engine algorithms. This will include using relevant keywords and search phrases (you can use Google’s Keyword Planner), a good meta description and title tag, and relevant links. Your content should be uploaded at regular intervals to create a steady stream of fresh information for search engines to index.
As well as a blog, your static pages like the FAQs should also be highly relevant and feature keywords and links.
Use Your Images Wisely
As well as being an important element that helps your visitors to form their first impression, your images can also be leveraged for better SEO. Using high-quality images that are relevant to the topic and have the right ALT Tags can help to boost your SEO efforts even further. The file name is also important as a search engine should be able to tell what an image is from how you name it.
Captions can also be a great addition to your images, as visitors who don’t want to read all the content will sometimes just read the captions. It can be easy to get carried away with images, but it’s also important to make sure your page is always optimized for load speeds too.
You can use Google Image Sitemaps to submit extra information about your images to Google, which helps you rank higher in image searches, helping more people to discover your site.
Keep on Top of All Aspects
It can be easy to get carried away with a single aspect of SEO, but it’s important to keep one eye on the bigger picture. A good SEO web crawler tool will help you to monitor several aspects of your site, as well as keeping you up to date on what your competitors are doing.
Ensure External Links Add Authority
Linking to popular and well-regarded websites helps to add authority to your site. It’s almost popularity by proxy. Associating your site with their information also adds trustworthiness and relevance to your information. The more relevant to your niche you can make the links, the better. However, don’t overdo outbound links as too many can be counterproductive.
Whatever approach you take, SEO is a long-term commitment that requires patience and persistence. Concentrate on going a bit slower but addressing all the various areas as you go, as this will produce a bigger pay off in the long run.
