SEO is an integral part of marketing your company.

Customers and your target audience use the internet in every day life. They use their mobile devices, computers, and smart devices in-home (Alexa and Google Home, for example). To help them make decisions about where to live, what they eat, what they wear, which car to drive and how to entertain themselves.

No matter what industry you are in, a solid search engine optimization plan can help you succeed. You don’t have to be ready to hire an SEO company to do your search engine optimization. Here are some easy steps to help you create your own SEO strategy to make the most of basic best practice for your business.

7 things you should include in your SEO strategy

Identify your audience and objectives

Your goal is to be found by your target customer. Once they find you, your goal is to convert leads into customers. How are you going make this happen?

You can sell products online, offer a service at home, or just want people to come into your brick and mortar store. Knowing your objectives and who your target audience is will help you create an effective SEO strategy.

What problems are they looking for help with? What are their questions? What can you do to be their go-to resource?

Do your research. You should first define your goals and create a strategy. Then, you need to evaluate the results and determine where to invest your time and effort.

We want your company to be found by your target audience. SEO is not just about your company. This is where competitive analysis comes in. Make sure you know not only what your customers want but also what your competitors do (and don’t do) to meet those needs. Read more.

Take a look at your website carefully

What kind of website do your competitors have? What kind of website does your largest local competitor have? You want to be at the top of the rankings whenever possible, and to show potential customers why you are the best choice.

Good web design includes things like fast loading times, easy purchasing of products, simple navigation and a clear call to action.

You can run through some scenarios to see what your customers are looking for on your site. You can even set up an UX test on one of the many websites online. Or host a focus group to ask your customers to run through scenarios. This will allow you to get real-time feedback from people unfamiliar with your website and offerings.

If the site is well-designed and contains basic information, CRO (conversion rate optimizing) may be a good option. However, you will need guidance as to where and what to put. You can request a CRO audit if you are able to update your website yourself or have someone who can help you implement them.

SEO basics

It is important to understand the basics of SEO in terms of content structure, layout, keyword research, and keyword optimizing. Your website may need some tweaks to make it more effective as a lead generation tool. Maybe it’s time for a complete redesign.

Your website must be easy to find by search engine bots. They will crawl every page to determine how to index it or where to rank it. In their crawling efforts they consider metadata, backlink profile, and domain authority. They also take into account what visitors do on the page after they arrive, including bounce rate, sessions per session, and time spent on page.

The user experience and engagement are just as important as the technical aspects of optimizing your site. That traffic should convert into a lead, buyer or opt-in to your email list to allow you to market to them again in the future. When deciding whether to send you more traffic, search engines also consider how their traffic behaves upon arrival.

Check your Google Analytics to make sure everything is tracking correctly, that spam filters have been added, and that website traffic looks correct. To find trends and insights about where users are getting stuck, or where you can spend more time optimizing your website, check out your Google Analytics every week.

You should be prepared to continue working on SEO

Search engine optimization is not a science. There are many factors to take into consideration and they are constantly changing.

Once you have optimized your website, you should continue to monitor your conversion rates in order to understand the experience that your visitors have with your site.

• If you are an online business, can they be converted into buyers?
• Are you experiencing a high bounce rate? Traffic sources don’t go beyond the page they are on.
• Are you receiving leads or quotes from your website?
• Are rising website traffic levels equivalent to increased in-store sales if your business isn’t eCommerce?

Both on-page and off-page SEO

SEO can be broken down into many different things. It is important to implement both an on-page as well as off-page strategy.

Your site will appear more relevant if you use off-page methods such as business citations and link building. This can help drive qualified traffic to the website.

Content optimization, an on-page SEO technique, will improve the ranking of your content in search results. This includes blog posts as well as main service pages.

Optimizing your website is about making it easy for search engine crawlers to find it. You also want it to be easily understood by them. Your online visibility will increase not only through content and link building, but also your mobile friendliness and user experience, and pagespeed.

SEO is not an overnight process. Search engines are constantly evolving so it takes time. You may be outsmarted by a competitor as soon as you make some progress.

Keyword optimization

It is important to use the right keywords at the right places. It may seem impossible to get traction with some keywords. You might also find low-hanging fruits that you can capitalize on with great success.

On-page Optimization

It is important to place keywords in the URL, page title and subheadings. Consider the length of your content, and how it compares to organic competitors. SEMrush, Ahrefs are tools that can help you determine what content to add to increase your rankings.

Avoid keyword stuffing

In terms of keyword density, quality is more important that quantity. Each page on your website can bring in traffic and generate business. However, if they are not satisfied with the experience, they will leave your site without purchasing.

Offpage SEO

Your business type will determine what an off-page SEO strategy should include. This could include content marketing and social marketing. For more help, look at the competition, understand your target audience and learn about SEO strategies in your niche.

Competitive analysis

How are you doing against the competition? How does your competition stack up? What do they do that you can fill? You don’t need a lot of competition in your area to develop a strong SEO strategy.

TipJust cause you don’t have much competition right now doesn’t mean it won’t change. You need to constantly assess your rankings, conversion rates, and competition in order to make sure you do well with SEO, online marketing, and that you appeal to customers for repeat business and comparison shopping.

Additional things to consider:

• What are people searching for in order to find your company? They don’t all use a computer. It is important to use voice search terms and local identifiers.
• What social media platforms are most popular with your target audience? Some target audiences spend more time using Facebook than others, while others use Instagram and Twitter. An effective social media strategy will help you increase your SEO efforts. Split test and compare the results to see if you are on the right path.
• How can you increase traffic to your site beyond organic SEO? Paid ads are used by some. Others use paid ads. Email marketing and newsletter marketing are also options. Posts on social media about new products, specials, or discounts can help. Search engine marketing, paid advertising campaigns and SEO are all possible to reap the benefits.
• Online reputation and reviews are important for certain businesses, such as restaurants and home-based services. Your SEO and online marketing strategies should include monitoring your online reputation. Do not just optimize for “Best”, but also work to build a reputation as the best.

Continuously analyze your competition, SEO, as well as analytics

To see what is working well and what needs improvement, you should regularly review your website traffic reports. This will allow you to keep an eye on trends, competition and SEO techniques in your industry.

At Kobe Digital you can learn more about SEO and for more information please visit our website on regular basis for more content.