If you’re a business owner, or even just someone trying to increase their online presence, you may have heard the term SEO before. SEO is a very important tool to help your business grow, but do you know what it is? We’re handing over our ultimate guide to SEO so you can know how and why you should be using it to your benefit.
What Is SEO and How Can It Help Me?
SEO is an acronym for the term search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a tool that aims to boost a company’s ranking on search engine result pages. Many tactics can help boost your SEO, but they need to be used correctly, consistently, and in correlation with each other. Developing an SEO strategy is key to succeeding and seeing a return on investment.
Ranking higher on a search engine results page makes your business more visible to consumers which, in turn, results in more website visits. Say you’re a home building company in Auburn, Alabama. If a potential consumer searches “houses in Auburn,” and you’re not one of the top web pages to pop up, that consumer will very likely choose another home builder whose website was one of the top 5 pages to appear on the results page. Ensuring that you are one of those top 5 pages is crucial in getting consumers’ attention. Once you start utilizing SEO tactics and the search engine reranks you, you can automatically see your business’s website rank higher. However, it may take a few months for you to see a return on investment due to the time it will take for new consumers to see your website.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO boosts your rankings on search engine result pages. Basically, you want to optimize your website’s content in order for it to rank higher. Optimizing your page involves using a search engine’s algorithm to your advantage. Knowing what specific elements a search engine looks at to determine its results page rankings is important because that information can help you strategize a plan to your advantage.
Search engines use different factors to determine where a web page should rank on a results page. Rankings start from the top spot on a page all the way down to the bottom spot on the last results page. These rankings change depending on SEO. Like the last example, if consumers were to search “houses in Auburn,” more than 10 pages of search results would render. How often have you clicked on a website on the 10th page of search engine results? You do not want your company’s website to be on that page.
Search engines strive to provide users with more relevant information for their queries. Pages are then ranked based on how authoritative, popular, or relevant they are. Search engines keep the specific algorithms that they use to rank websites secret. Google, specifically, gives the public some general information on how their algorithm works. However, they keep it vague enough that the average reader won’t know how to interpret this information in a way that tells you what SEO strategies you need to adopt. Don’t worry. Over time, marketing agencies have found what factors a business should consider boosting SEO.
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO marketing strategy is the playbook for how your business should plan on boosting your SEO. There are many ways to improve your website’s SEO. Search engines look for elements like tags, keywords, links, structure, design, etc. to determine how high your page should rank on its results page. However, three factors that should be the most important in your SEO strategy are technical website setup, content, and links.
Your business’s website setup needs to not only look aesthetically pleasing to consumers but also needs to be set up in a way that the search engine can easily scan it in order to rank it. In order to handle the latter, your website needs to be easy to navigate. Your webpage also needs to have simple URLs and a fast loading time. Your webpage page should include content and a lot of it. Don’t forget to also utilize keywords in that content. Keywords should be used in content, titles, URLs, tags, meta-descriptions, file names…everything! Lastly, you need to include links. These links can take you off the website to an external site. However, it's better for your content to link back to another page on the website. For example, you can link your contact page to your site’s content.
How We Can Help
Auburn Advertising is a public service of Inner Spark Creative, and we want to assist you with all of your advertising needs. We are a full-service marketing and advertising agency located in the Auburn-Opelika area that offers SEO services as well as other marketing and advertising services to our clients. We have a variety of services including branding, IP targeting, and web design. Contact us today to request a proposal for your business. We would love to hear from you and discuss how Inner Spark Creative can help you grow!
