If you’ve spent any time trying to grow website traffic, you’ll have heard of search engine optimization (SEO). Excelling with SEO makes it easier to attract new website visitors, netting more leads and more revenue.
Getting your SEO right takes time—and a lot of trial and error. But if you use a website built on a platform like WordPress.com, you’ve got plenty of options when it comes to increasing your visibility in search engines.
In this article, you’ll discover several ways to rank for SEO on your WordPress.com website.
Differentiating Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
Before we look at how you can rank for SEO with WordPress.com, it’s essential to identify the differences between it and WordPress.org. Often, users think they’re both identical—but that’s far from the truth.
Building a website with WordPress.com means that the platform will host your site. Though you can subscribe to various paid plans, you can also choose to use a free version. Unfortunately, this practice will severely limit customization.
On the flip side, WordPress.org is open source. While using WordPress.org is free, you’ll need to buy a hosted domain. WordPress.org gives more control than its .com counterpart, but it also requires more effort from you to maintain the site.
Okay, so now you know the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Next, let’s take a deeper dive into how you can rank for SEO with a WordPress.com site.
Use SEO Plugins
If you’ve got a WordPress.com Business plan or higher, you can install a selection of SEO plugins with WordPress. One of the most common is Yoast, which offers a comprehensive solution to optimize SEO on your pages.
Once integrated, Yoast will rank your SEO with a traffic light system—red means you’ve got a lot of room for improvement, amber means that it’s okay (but nothing more or less), and green means you’re good to go.
Yoast also enables you to choose keywords and phrases while offering a readability score to help you create content that is easier to understand.
Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Yoast is an excellent tool for improving SEO on your WordPress.com website, but it’s a good idea to use the plugin in conjunction with others. Two commonly used SEO-related tools are Google Analytics and Google Search Console—both of which are free.
Google Analytics is the Silicon Valley giant’s free analytics tool and offers a broad range of valuable insights. Some of the areas you can gather useful information about include:
Your website’s bounce rate.
Average session times.
How people find your website.
The time of day that people visit your website.
As for Google Search Console, you can find out how your website performs specifically in search rankings. Search Console will also help you:
Discover your average clickthrough rate (CTR).
Find out which search terms lead users to your site.
Learn what your average search engine ranking is.
To use Google Analytics and Search Console, you’ll need to manually set them up for your website. But doing so is a reasonably straightforward process.
Another perk of Google Analytics and Search Console is that you don’t need a WordPress.com Business plan to use either. So, if you’re on a budget, the tools can help minimize your SEO expenses.
Think About Your Imagery
Optimizing the text on your WordPress.com website is crucial if you want to rank highly with search engines. However, your image optimization is just as important.
The size of any visuals you add to your website will impact your web page’s performance. If your page takes too long to load, users will go elsewhere—and your rankings will suffer as a result. So, you need to ensure that photos aren’t too big and your pages load fast (both on desktop and mobile).
When adding images, you also want to ensure the dimensions fit your page. You’re not going to find a one-size-fits-all solution for this; it’ll depend on your theme and other factors.
Customizing the image title and alt text also helps Google understand your picture and why it’s relevant. So, it’s worth keeping both of these goals in mind when adding featured and in-text photos.
Post Consistently and Add Value
Regardless of how well you’ve optimized your page for search engines, it doesn’t mean much if the content itself isn’t attractive to your audience. To gain traction, you must post relevant and original content and add value for users visiting your site.
If you’ve just set up a WordPress.com website, challenge yourself to publish at least one blog post every day for a year. As long as you adapt and fine-tune what you write, you’ll see your traffic grow. And as a side benefit, your writing will improve with the extra practice.
Alongside posting consistently, you can also improve your search rankings by updating old content regularly. For example, refresh the text, edit the links, and remove anything that is no longer accurate, such as old statistics.
Choose a Well-Functioning Theme
Regardless of whether you have a free or paid WordPress.com plan, you’ll have access to a wide selection of themes. When choosing one, it’s important to think about more than how it’ll look once your website goes live.
Like the images on your website, the theme you choose can dictate how fast pages load. Rather than pick a theme that loads slowly, you’re better off choosing something that’s less attractive but won’t frustrate visitors.
You can experiment by trying different themes, and it’s worth reading online reviews to see which ones work the best.
Use WordPress.com to Build Your Online Presence
With hundreds of millions of blogs out there today, standing out is a lot harder than it used to be. However, complicated doesn’t mean impossible—and despite what many people think, it’s not too late to start your blog.
Although growing a WordPress.com website’s presence takes time, you can speed up the process by thinking about the areas we’ve listed in this article. Additionally, more users will find you if you optimize your site content and track your performance using analytics.
Danny is a freelance technology writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, having moved there from his native Britain in 2020. He writes about a variety of topics, including social media and security. Outside of writing, he is a keen photographer. More From Danny Maiorca
Google’s progress over the last 20 years is mind-blowing when you think about it. Not long ago, users were impartial to the likes of Yahoo, Bing or even Ask Jeeves. Those names have since faded into the periphery while Google has gotten better at serving up relevant answers in record time – even if we’ve entered incoherent phrases littered with typos. Basically, Google gets us. And it keeps getting better at it.
The ever-evolving game of SEO has been largely dependent on the smarts of the Google Algorithm, and it’s changed a lot over the years. The latest development? Semantic SEO. But what is it? And how do you optimize your content in a way that keeps the Google robots happy? Let’s take a closer look.
Where did semantic SEO come from?
To understand how to optimize for Google, it helps to understand a bit of its history.
Initially, SEO relied on singular keyword-focused algorithms. Then came some pretty catalytic jumps, namely with ‘Knowledge Graph,’ ‘Hummingbird,’ ‘RankBrain,’ and ‘BERT’ between 2012 – 2021.
Knowledge Graph was revolutionary in creating a mindmap for Google to see the links between words. And Hummingbird made it possible for Google to understand a search queries’ full meaning rather than just as a string of individual keywords. It was also able to interpret a webpage’s overall topic, rather than just scan for certain words – a big reason that nefarious black-hat SEO technique keyword-stuffing fell out of favour.
With a priority in understanding users’ search intent better, the context of these search terms is also judged against existing search histories, considering their relevance within local and global parameters. Or in other words, it added context.
So say, for example, you typed ‘corona’ into your search bar. Currently, Google will predict that you’re more likely interested in the COVID-19 situation affecting your city, rather than the beer. So the first results you see will be related to just that. Semantic SEO is a step forward in the world of Google contextualizing.
What is semantic SEO?
To get to grips with semantic SEO, it’s helpful to unpack the word semantic.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, semantics is “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.”
Semantic SEO is based on lexical semantics – so how the words relate to one another.
1. How to optimize your content for semantic SEO
Google aims to respond to users’ questions with articles containing the most valuable information and predictively answer follow-up questions. It knows humans are curious creatures, after all. So we will teach you how to optimize your content for quality AND be picked up favourably by Google’s radar.
First, you need to understand the intent of your article. Or in other words, which of the reader’s needs are you answering? Intent falls into 3 categories – and it’s crucial to know which of these your piece falls into if you’re going to keep readers happy. Users are browsing on the internet to either –
Learn something;
Buy something; or
Find something specific (e.g., a shop their friend has just mentioned).
The breakdown of this intent falls roughly into 80%, 10% and 10%, respectively. Most users are on the internet with specific questions that they want answers to. So it’s important to understand the questions your article is trying to answer — otherwise, your website won’t convert, your bounce rate will be sky-high, and Google will penalize you for not being what your readers want.
2. Create quality content (not pieces jammed with keywords)
Most users don’t jump on Google to open a digital encyclopaedia and sift through information. Remember that. They want the specifics, and the worst thing you can try to do is provide a short, surface-level general overview of the subject. Google Knowledge Panels and Wikipedia already exist for this exact reason.
Knowledge panels are snippets of ‘general info’ pinned to the top of search results. So really, your general info article is getting into the ring with Google, and you can guess who we’d place our bets on.
Once you have the question your article is trying to answer, really unpack the value in that. Ensure your piece is thorough. You can even go as far as answering other questions related to that route of curiosity.
Top tip: According to recent web design statistics, content you wrote years ago can still work to boost your SEO and organic Google traffic. Google bots actively crawl every page of your website to find relevant matches to users’ search queries. Maintaining an active blog increases your chance of multiple pages being picked up and shown on the first page of Google.
At the end of the day, your piece should be chock-full of long-tail keywords connected to the topic of interest. Google will pick up on the quantity and quality of the semantically connected phrases peppered through your article and increase the relevance score of your article.
A quick example…
Say you’re writing an analytical piece about Harry Potter. Your semantically connected phrases could include ‘seventh Harry Potter book,’ ‘The Boy Who Lived Next Door,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Neville Longbottom’, and ‘understanding the prophecy.’
Google would crawl this article and understand it is suited for readers who want to understand the relationship between Potter and Longbottom. In contrast, semantically connected phrases for an entertainment piece about the cast could include ‘child actors,’ ‘cast of Harry Potter,’ and ‘film journey.’
Ten years ago, the SEO strategy for both articles would have been to stuff the keyword “Harry Potter” in as many times as sanely possible. Thankfully, Google’s comprehension skills have improved, so we can focus more on writing richer pieces of content, without repeating ourselves unnecessarily.
3. Long-form content is better than short
It is difficult to cover a topic well in less than 300 words. So don’t waste the precious chance with a case of cat-got-your-tongue when people arrive at your show.
Google doesn’t want its users to have to hop through various pages to get the answers – that would be a bit like phoning up a customer service helpline that kept redirecting you to a different department member for every question you had (oh wait…been there). Frustrating!
No one’s limiting your time on stage, so go long. Instead, write pieces of 2,000-2,500 words that cover more ground and cast a wider safety net in answering a multitude of questions.
These longer articles can really help boost your lead conversion and drive organic traffic to your site. They also provide you with more opportunities to add semantically linked phrases – and when it comes to optimizing your site for semantic SEO, that’s definitely a good thing.
4. Increase the relevance of your article by reverse-fitting it to Google
Look at what comes up in the Google dropdown search bar. This will give you ideas for semantically related phrases you can tie into your article. It’ll also give you a better understanding of your user’s interests.
Google’s dropdown list will help you understand your user’s interests.
Additionally, you can scroll down to the end of the search results page, and record the small list of ‘Related Keywords’ displayed here.
Collectively these can guide what you cover in your piece, give you a mind map of LSI keywords (aka long-tail keywords) and the kinds of medium-tail keywords you can use. Incorporating more of both of these is preferable. It means you’ll cast a wider net for your article because Google will automatically include you for the longer-tail keywords.
5. Rank well for informational queries to earn a ‘Featured Snippet’
Everyone used to covet the Position 1 spot on a Google search results page. But now, people are aiming for Position 0. Why? Because you’re not only first, but Google additionally shows an open sliver of your content. It’s really like getting a foot into the door of attention, increasing traffic to your page from the users who’d like to read more.
You can aim to be chosen for these ‘featured snippets’ through structuring your content with question headlines, followed by bullet point answers or scannable content. Incorporating various headlines with popular questions and relevant answers will improve your chance to rank better for the overall topic. Instead of just reeling in people based on one keyword, you can catch people who asked various kinds of questions to do with your topic.
If you don’t get the Position 0 spot, don’t fret: aim for another highly-placed spot instead. You will recognize Google shows an accordion-style FAQ of follow-up questions underneath the ‘featured snippet.’ When clicked on, a snippet of the answer opens up, so it’s a very respectable runner-up prize.
6. Use structured mark-up and semantic tags in your code
Not seen by users, this backend advanced SEO technique helps the Google machinery understand the organization of your article. Using semantic HTML elements enhances the accessibility and searchability of your article. It also improves your chances of achieving the coveted Google 0 position.
Using semantic tags tells the browser a little more about the meaning and the hierarchy of the content. Instead of seeing <div> and <span> for differing blocks of content — use semantic tags like <header> <nav> <article> <footer> to organize your content. And within content blocks, use element heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and paragraph). These break up the text and order your copy according to importance.
Final thoughts
There’s an opportunity to delve deeper into topics to rank well as a specialist article covering a niche topic. You can also feature it as an informational snippet in Position 0. Now Google has caught up in leaps and bounds; you can worry less about gaming the system with keyword-stuffing — and instead, challenge yourself to write even more meaningful content.
Irwin Hau is a private business consultant and Founder of Chromatix, a multi-award-winning web design and conversion agency based in Melbourne, Australia. Since opening shop in 2009, he’s gone on to amass over 70 awards and mentions for work in web design and digital solutions.
In an age where all B2B marketing is digital yet very little of it actually works, it’s tough to know whose advice you can trust. Perhaps the first clue is when they acknowledge, up front, just how ineffective most marketing really is.
Alex Boyd, founder and CEO of RevenueZen, isn’t shy about sharing what most B2B marketers get wrong about SEO and LinkedIn. But he’s hesitant to give advice without first understanding the context and nuance of a particular situation, which is usually a sign someone has earned their chops.
I recently caught up with Boyd to hear his thoughts on SEO strategy, demand gen philosophy, LinkedIn spam, and why, at the end of the day, a simple phone call can go a long way.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Kevin Kruse: What have you seen change or shift in marketing and demand generation in the last several years?
Alex Boyd: Anything “mass” has decreased in effectiveness as well as anything easy to measure with a low barrier to entry. Those types of activities have less value because everyone presses the buttons that are easy to press, like sending a lot of emails and running a lot of very general ads. When you think about what marketers need to do to justify their tactics, it’s usually putting up big numbers on a dashboard to show to the CEO who doesn’t always “get it.” And so the easier something is to measure and show on that dashboard, the more marketers will do it, even if the channel is saturated and the leads aren’t converting.
Kruse: What’s a common misconception people have about demand generation?
Boyd: A lot of people think all leads are created equal, but they’re not. How you got that lead in the first place is so important. On paper, a lead is an object in a CRM with an email address. But how would a salesperson define a “lead”? It’s somebody who’s gotten more interested in your product than they were before. The person who says, “I saw your CEO in that great Forbes article and I have a few friends that use your company. I’m ready to sign,” is a lead. But, to many marketers, so is the person who entered their email address just to download a checklist and always dodges your calls when you follow up. Those two leads are not equal. Demand generation isn’t about the quantity of leads. It’s focusing on how the lead got to your company, and whether or not the environment in which they arrived warmed them up to what you sell.
Kruse: In general, what’s working in B2B marketing, assuming “working” means generating a lead that comes to you in the right way and with some interest to potentially buy?
Boyd: You already know it depends, but I’ll share what I’m seeing: first, founder-driven, brand marketing—meaning sharing the perspective of what the leadership team believes in a personal, organic way. LinkedIn is a good example, but this could also look like the CEO giving a fireside chat, or speaking at an event. People want to know what the people behind the product believe because that tells them more than a list of features. The feature list is static, but what the founders and leadership team believe is dynamic—it tells you about the future and where the company is headed. CEOs shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that managing their social media accounts is “below them”: many prominent CxOs of tech unicorns are very active on social.
Secondly, organic search still has a lot of potential. Most SEO is still done quite badly, even by experts. The biggest thing that Software-as-a-Service companies in particular get wrong about SEO is they think they need to optimize for people searching for exactly what they do. That’s table stakes. What the SaaS companies who see massive growth through organic search do is they compete for the attention of their buyer. It’s not a game of what your product does, it’s a game of attention. And if you get in front of people and put your name, brand and insights in front of them while they’re looking for related content and they happen to encounter your product that way, you’re going to show them a new way of doing things. And that’s the core of SaaS marketing: showing someone a new way of doing things.
Kruse: Do you have a real-world example of how that kind of attention-grabbing SEO works?
Boyd: One of the best ways of doing SEO at first is to talk about the basics. Most companies will create a blog for announcements and news, but nobody is searching for your company. So why not rank for keywords they’re already searching for? A company called lightyear.ai is a great example. They’re a marketplace for IT and networking solutions—kind of like a kayak.com for IT. They don’t assume that people are searching for “IT product marketplace”, because they’re not. They rank for things that people search for to educate themselves on how to buy IT. It’s a subtle shift in thinking: when you’re a small start-up, your new idea is not the centre of your prospects’ universe.
Kruse: How should you approach SEO if you’re trying to sell something new?
Boyd: When you’re selling a brand-new product, the way you do SEO should change. Nobody is searching for your unique new product category – yet. If you sell something new, you need to rank for things that are related to what you do but aren’t your product. If you’re building an AI to help recruiters sort through resumes, you don’t want to rank for “AI resume screener”, you want to write about the Top 10 Ways to Screen Candidates, or How To Write An Amazing EEO Statement. Once your company is larger, this game changes and you then want to focus on people who are already looking for exactly what you do.
Kruse: You’ve been creating a new product for LinkedIn. Tell me about that.
Boyd: The way that people engage on LinkedIn has been broken for a long time. A lot of people see relationship-building as transactional: “I liked your posts, please take a meeting.” There’s a feeling of entitlement. That needs to change.
The right way to engage on LinkedIn involves writing good content, engaging with others, networking, and actually building community. Our product shows you which of your target accounts are talking to your competitors, customers and strong connections. And it tells you exactly which important conversations to take part in. The whole point of our product – Aware – is to give people the ability to send a LOW volume of hyper-targeted messages that have 60%+ conversion rate: unheard of.
Kruse: What’s one piece of advice you’d like to leave marketers with?
Boyd: Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Tech marketers spend so much time geeking out on growth-hacking funnel jockeying, but sometimes you just need to pick up the phone and call a prospect instead of waiting around for an answer. I think we need to spend more time building relationships with people, which sometimes means just calling them up.
Feature Image Credit: Founder of RevenueZen: Alex Boyd
Search engine optimization can help the right customers find your company. Embrace it.
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), business owners sometimes get a little skittish. At first glance, it might seem difficult to navigate. There are several common fears about SEO that business owners may have as their companies grow. These fears are often based in several myths about the power of digital marketing and SEO. Every marketing strategy must include SEO to increase exposure, improve website traffic, and boost an online presence.
Here are seven debunked fears about SEO that might encourage you to start the process.
1. It’s too difficult.
Let’s face it, SEO may not always be a piece of cake. It will take time to learn the ins and outs of SEO to gain the marketing strategies your company needs. Digital marketing is constantly evolving, and new best practices are emerging daily. It’s best to keep up with the latest SEO techniques and strategies by following blogs, reading posts, and watching videos about digital marketing. With simple research, SEO can advance your business dramatically by reaching your target audience.
2. It’s a scam.
Scammers may attempt to target SEO newbies since they are less familiar with optimization. It is best to develop a strong knowledge of SEO through research or webinars. To prevent scammers from targeting you, search for common red flags like promises. If an SEO agency or specialist provides you with a promise or a guarantee, such as the highest position on the search engine results page, it is probably a scam. Google uses several different factors to index and provide information, and new updates can always alter your rankings.
3. SEO might ruin my business.
While making too many drastic changes to a website at one time could cause search engines to get suspicious and penalize the site by dropping its rankings on the search engine results page, many SEO specialists make changes one step at a time to prevent any harm from occurring to your website and its rankings. Always follow the specialist’s or the agency’s progress to see what has been done and how it has advanced your website. SEO is a long-term strategy to grow a business, so you may not see any significant reports of change at the beginning of the process.
4. It’s too pricey.
It’s scary to spend valuable time and money and get little or no results. If you’re worried about the expense of SEO, you can always take baby steps and learn more about the lowest-priced services the SEO company or specialist provides. Some firms even offer a “trial package” to clients to see if this is the type of service that would suit them. An important metric to keep in mind when running any digital marketing strategy or campaign is your return on investment. This metric can measure the performance of the SEO techniques and strategies used.
5. There’s no way to measure success.
Google Analytics is able to deliver several insights from your website including impressions (the number of times an element on a page is served to a user), clicks, keywords, and traffic sources. Lead generation and landing page tools can add quantifiable traffic to your website. Plenty of other important information can be found on Google Analytics’ dashboard to quantify spending.
6. There’s no reason to create content.
Creating content boosts SEO. Content is vital in digital marketing because it gives users a reason to go to your website and find information about your company. High-quality content can easily help you become more visible online by increasing traffic. There is no point for a user to check out your website if there is no content posted. In short, content is king.
7. Results aren’t fast enough.
Once again, SEO is a long-term strategy to grow a business. There is a possibility that you won’t see any significant changes for the first few months. From law firms to merchandise retailers, every client varies. To see the best results, prioritize best practices that will pay off over the long run such as regularly creating new content and building authoritative links to your site. This will lead to SEO results growing consistently.
SEO is an important part of digital marketing and an investment that can pay off in the long run. Instead of listening to misconceptions and myths surrounding SEO, discover, embrace, and use the power of SEO to grow your business.
You can waste time reading hundreds of articles on SEO (which changes constantly, BTW), spend thousands of dollars learning the basics at school, or you can get access to a toolkit that breaks it all down for you.
With the GuinRank SEO content optimization tool, you can create content that Google automatically wants to rank. By running it through this AI tool, everything you publish will already be SEO-friendly. After all, since Google relies on artificial intelligence to rank and score web pages, it only makes sense to use AI to beat it at its own game.
GuinRank works by helping SEO beginners analyse their competitors’ keyword content and then providing ideas to write articles that easily result in the same search results. It features a keyword analyser (KA) that helps you understand exactly how hard it would be to rank for a search query based on the words you currently have. Then, you can adjust accordingly. It also features a content optimizer (CO), which increases your content’s relevance by simply recommending keywords to include within the sentences you already have. It will show you the top 20 Google results that pair with the subject of your content, so you can ensure your page ranks and shows up on search results.
See it in action:
GuinRank doesn’t just help show you which keywords to include in your content. It will even show you micro-niches on the internet that have little-to-no competition, so you can carve out a unique space on the web to get your content noticed and seen. You can even run your page through the page analyser tool, which will give you a Google score automatically, and show you what you can improve on.
A two-year subscription to this helpful tool is valued at $680. But, for a limited time, you can sign up for only $59.99.
Feature Image Credit: Good SEO strategy can bring you more online engagement.Credit: Caio / Pexels
Every business needs a website, and search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of helping people find it online. Not only is SEO a low-cost and evergreen way to attract new customers and build brand awareness, but implementing a few basic strategies at the outset can have a major impact on your bottom line.
Here are some easy SEO practices that can help take your business’s site up a notch.
Build technical SEO strategies.
Technical SEO helps search engines read your website. If you improve the technical aspects of your site, you can usually improve both your rankings and your user experience. These basic technical SEO strategies are a great place to start:
• Boost your site speed: Think about your own browsing habits — when something takes forever to load, you aren’t as likely to stick around. Search engines see this as an indication that your site isn’t answering users’ questions and move you down in the rankings.
• Use internal links: By using internal links, you help search engines understand what content on your site is important and how it all relates to other pages. For example, a dog groomer’s website might link a blog post about trimming nails to a page listing its services.
• Avoid confusion: Search engines don’t like duplicate content or 404 errors popping up throughout a site. For that matter, neither do people. So if you move content, be sure to use a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one to let search engines know where it went.
• Secure your site: Getting an SSL certificate is easy to do and gives your domain the higher priority “https” prefix rather than just “http.” Websites with an SSL certificate almost always rank higher than those without one.
The takeaway: Take the time to build a website that is easily navigable, loads quickly and doesn’t have broken links or pages. When everything works, you’ll make most search engines happier.
Write content with SEO in mind.
Whatever type of content you create — blog posts, videos or something else entirely — you need it to fulfill two fundamental requirements:
• Provide information that is important to your target audience.
• Show up in search engines so your target audience can find it.
A good way to start is to develop content that answers the questions your customers most frequently ask about your industry. By answering common questions, you ensure that your content is relevant.
But users can’t appreciate good content without finding it first, so the next part of the equation is keyword research. Keyword tools like SEMRush, Wordstream or Wordtracker let you find keywords that have good search volume, are easy to rank for and relevant to your business.
The reality is that you may have to get pretty granular to capture the audience share you want. Let’s look at Kin as an example. “Insurance” is an incredibly broad and competitive keyword that doesn’t tell us much about what the user is looking for. Do they want business insurance? Life insurance? Are they ready to buy or just doing research? It’s hard to say, so we aim for keywords that are relevant to what we do: homeowners insurance. This, and related keywords, may have less search volume but they’re more targeted.
Once you know your keywords, get them in your content. Every page of content should be optimized for a primary and secondary keyword. Experts recommend using your primary keyword once or twice for every 100 words of content. Secondary keywords don’t get used as much but should be peppered throughout the content.
The takeaway: Keeping SEO in mind ensures that you write content that your target audience is looking for. The more you deliver on what readers want, the more likely you are to rank higher in search results.
Build backlinks from trusted sources.
Earning links to your site from other websites shows your content is relevant and trustworthy. In fact, someone found your information so useful that they wanted to link back to your page as the source. Search engines read backlinks as a strong indication that your content is valuable.
In recent years, search engines have prioritized websites in search results that have a degree of credibility for the topic. That’s why you often hear SEO experts now talk about a website’s E-A-T, or its Expertise, Authority and Trust. Search engines like Google reward quality backlinks that come from well-known and authoritative websites.
Some backlinks may show up on your site without you doing anything, but the majority of businesses that take SEO seriously work to get other quality sites to link to them. This usually involves reaching out to webmasters and content developers of websites that you want a link from. Yes, you are asking for a link, but doing so in a way that provides the business case that explains why your content is relevant to their audience.
The takeaway: The better your content is, the more likely you are to get organic backlinks. You may also want to employ a link-building strategy that helps you get the sites that you really want to link to your site.
Learn how to interpret analytics.
The best websites do a good job of turning web traffic into customers. Do the people who come to your site take action? Are they signing up for your newsletter or buying from your store? Is there a page that’s getting a lot of views that could end up improving sales?
Any entrepreneur can use data to answer these questions. Free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics show you how much traffic you’re getting and where that traffic is going. Once you have baseline data, you can set realistic goals, whether that’s increasing traffic or keeping people on your site longer.
The takeaway: Data drives SEO campaigns. For entrepreneurs who are just getting started, there are plenty of free tools that can help you learn more about how users are engaging with your site.
In 2021, harnessing the power of SEO is a necessity for all businesses, regardless of their size or industry. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the power of the digital; companies that had a pre-established online presence found it far easier to navigate the challenges of lockdowns and border closures than those that didn’t.
SEO is quite a technical area of marketing, which is why many companies opt to outsource their SEO activities to external agencies. While this is a great strategy, there tends to be an enormous difference in the quality of work and results obtained between various SEO companies. So, how can you tell the good from the bad?
If you are searching for a team specializing in SEO in Melbourne, read on to discover what factors you should consider (and which agencies you should definitely steer clear of!)
What does an SEO agency do?
Before picking an SEO agency, it’s important that you understand their exact function.
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation’, which is the process of making improvements to your site to increase search engine visibility. When you search a term — known as a keyword — using a search engine, the engine will crawl through every page on the internet, taking into account a variety of factors to present the website they think best matches what you are looking for.
These factors can include:
How secure a website is
The page load speed
Whether or not a site is mobile friendly
‘Crawlability’ — that is, whether or not the engine’s bots can access a page.
Analytics on user engagement
The presence of quality, keyword optimised content
Backlink profile.
It is the role of an SEO agency to put together a strategy that elevates your website to the top of the search engine results page, or SERP.
SEO is different to ‘pay per click’ advertising, or PPC, in that you cannot pay to have a site elevated to the top of organic search results. It takes insider knowledge, a strategic mindset, and hard work to get a website ranking for any one particular keyword. A good SEO agency understands this and knows that your end goal is to have more traffic to your site that results in increased profits.
How to choose an SEO agency
First up — why do I need an SEO agency?
While it’s true that there are some areas of SEO you can implement yourself, it really is a job best left to the professionals. By hiring a reputable SEO company in Australia, your company can focus on what they do best while benefiting from the experience and knowledge of SEO experts.
However, not all SEO agencies are created equal, and there are literally thousands of them out there. When deciding between agencies, consider the following key points:
1. Make sure they know what they’re talking about
One of the great things about SEO is the amount of resources there are out there. The SEO community is enormous and very willing to share their knowledge with newcomers.
The downside of this is that many agencies claim to be SEO experts when they only really have beginner knowledge. SEO is more of a science than an art and it takes extreme skill and patience to execute proven strategies.
That’s the other thing about SEO — it takes time. Don’t be fooled by any agency who promises quick results. In reality, it can take months to improve keyword ranking, particularly if you are operating by the SEO rules.
An agency that advertises lightning fast turnaround may be following ‘black-hat’ techniques. If Google, or any other search engines, catches on to the fact that you are trying to bend the rules, they can blacklist your website and send it plummeting to the bottom of the search rankings.
Be discerning about who you trust your website with and only work with agencies who have proven results and know what they’re talking about.
2. Understand your own goals
SEO is really just another form of marketing, and the end goal of any marketing strategy is to increase customer engagement (and profits). For most people, this will be their SEO goal.
However, amidst terms like ‘keyword ranking’ ‘traffic’ ‘lead generation’ and ‘page speed’, this goal can quickly get lost. Before meeting with an SEO agency, make sure you have sat down internally and discussed your future direction. If your goals line up with the expertise and strategies of your SEO agency, you are more likely to have a successful campaign and get a return on your marketing investment.
3. Ask for recommendations
When it comes time to pick an SEO agency, many people turn to Google. After all, a team that specialises in search engine ranking should occupy a top spot on the Google results page, right?
Well, not necessarily. A better strategy might be to ask for recommendations within your industry or from other similarly sized companies. There are many factors that go into a good SEO agency, and not all of them can be demonstrated through a quick Google search.
4. Communication is key
Finally, prioritise communication. Ideally, your SEO agency should report to you on a monthly basis. This report can include what kinds of on-page, technical, and off-page activities they have undertaken and what the results have been — increased keyword ranking, improved page speed, and more.
Whether these reports are accompanied by in-person (or virtual) meetings is up to you. However, when you’re trusting your website and search engine rankings with an external agency, more communication is always better than less.
Finding an SEO company in Australia is no easy task. Take your time, meet with agencies in-person, and ask all the questions you need so that you can be confident in your choice. Then sit back and let the SEO experts do the work for you!
Head keywords. Long-tail keywords. The chunky middle. The chonky thorax. Is it any wonder why most people outside of SEO think we’re talking gibberish? Ask a dozen SEOs what keywords qualify as “long-tail” and you’ll get 13 opinions and 17 fistfights.
What we can agree on is that — due to Google’s advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — the long tail of search has exploded. However, I will argue that NLP has also imploded the long tail, and understanding how and why may save our collective sanity.
What is the long tail of SEO, exactly?
The long tail of search is the limitless space of low-volume (and often low-competition) keywords. Tactically, long-tail SEO centres on competing for a large number of low-volume keywords instead of focusing on a small set of high-volume keywords.
Long-tail SEO encourages us to let go of vanity, because high-volume, so-called “vanity” keywords are often out of reach or, at best, will empty our bank accounts. Low-volume keywords may be less attractive on the surface, but as you begin to compete on hundreds or thousands of them, they represent more traffic and ultimately more sales than a few vanity keywords.
You’ve probably seen a graph of the long tail like the one above. It’s a perfectly lovely power curve, but it’s purely hypothetical. And while you may smile and nod when you see it, it’s hard to translate this into a world of keywords. It might help to re-imagine the long tail of SEO:
I’m not sure the “reclining snowman of SEO” is ever going to catch on, but I think it helps to illustrate that — while head keywords are high-volume by themselves — the combined volume of the long tail eclipses the head or the middle. Like the familiar curve, this visualization dramatically underestimates the true scope of the long tail.
What are long-tail keywords?
In the words of the ancient SEOs, “It doth depend.” Typically, long-tail keywords are low-volume, multi-word phrases, but the long-tail is relative to your starting point. Historically, any given piece of the long tail was assumed to be low-competition, but that’s changing as people realize the benefits of targeting specific phrases with clear intent (especially commercial intent).
Targeting “widgets” is not only expensive, but searcher intent is ambiguous. Targeting “buy blue widgets” narrows intent, and “where to buy Acme Widget LOL-42” laser-focuses you on a target audience. As searchers and SEOs adapt to natural language search, previously “long-tail” keywords may become higher volume and higher competition.
The long tail has exploded
Google has told us that 15% of the searches they see every day are new. How is this possible? Are we creating that many new words? That’s sus, bruh!
I can explain it to you in a very short story. The other day, my (half-Taiwanese) 10-year-old daughter couldn’t remember what her Chinese zodiac sign was, so she asked Google Home:
Hey, Google, what’s the animal for the Chinese new year calendar thingy for 2010?
It’s easy to get hung up on the voice-appliance aspect of this, but whether or not you believe in the future of voice appliances, the reality is that voice search in general has driven the need for natural language search, and as Google becomes better at handling natural language, we’re reverting to using it more often (it’s our default mode). This is especially evident in kids, who never had to learn to dumb down their searches for antiquated algorithms.
How can we hope to target keyword phrases that are literally evolving as we speak? Fortunately, NLP cuts both ways. As Google understands context better, the algorithm recognizes that many variations of the same phrase or question are essentially the same. Which leads us to…
The long tail has imploded
Back in 2019, I did a keyword research case study at SearchLove London on UK mega-retailer, John Lewis. In my research, I was surprised to see how many searches Google was automatically redirecting. There’s the obvious, like Google assuming that people who searched for “Jon Lewis” in the UK probably meant “John Lewis” (sorry, Jon):
It’s interesting to note that Google has gradually, quietly moved from the previously more prevalent “Did you mean?” to the more assertive (some might say aggressive) “Showing results for…” In this case, optimizing for Jon Lewis in the UK is probably pointless.
I expected a rabbit hole, but I landed in a full-on bunny chasm. Consider this search:
Hjohjblewis?! I landed on this misspelling entirely by accident, but I imagine it involved an attention-starved cat and cat-adjacent keyboard. This level of rewriting/redirecting was shocking to me.
Misspellings are just the beginning, however. What about very similar long-tail phrases that don’t surface any kind of rewrite/redirect, but show very similar results?
Note that this same set of terms in the US overwhelmingly returns results about former US Representative and civil rights leader, John Lewis, demonstrating just how much not only intent can shift across localities, but how Google’s re-interpretations can change dynamically.
That same year, I did an experiment for MozCon targeting long-tail questions, such as “Can you reverse a 301-redirect?”, demonstrating that posts written around a specific question could often rank for many forms of that question. At the time, I didn’t have a way to measure this phenomenon, other than showing that the post ranked for variations of the phrase. Recently, I re-analysed my 2019 keywords (with rankings from April 2021) using a simplified form of Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) called RBOLite. RBOLite scores the similarity between two rank-ordered lists, yielding a score from 0-1. As the name implies, this score biases toward the higher-ranked items, so a shift at #1 will have more impact than a shift at #10.
Here are the scores for a sampling of the phrases I tracked for the 2019 post, with the title of the post shown at the top (and having a perfect match of 1.0):
You can see visually how the similarity of the results diverges as you change and remove certain keywords, and how this creates a complex interaction. What’s fascinating to me is that changing the question phrase from “Can you” to “How do you” or “How to” made very little difference in this case, while removing either “301” or “redirect” had more impact. Switching “you” vs. “I” by itself was fairly low impact, but was additive with other changes. Even the SERPs with “undo” in place of “reverse” showed fairly high similarity, but this change showed the most impact.
Note that the week-over-week RBOLite score for the initial phrase was 0.95, so even the same SERP will vary over time. All of these scores (>0.75) represent a fair degree of similarity. This post ranked #1 for many of these terms, so these scores often represent shifts farther down the top 10.
Here’s another example, based on the question “How do I improve my domain authority?”. As above, I’ve charted the RBOLite similarity scores between the main phrase and variations. In this case, the week-over-week score was 0.83, suggesting some background flux in the keyword space:
One immediately interesting observation is that the difference between “improve” and “increase” was negligible — Google easily equated the two terms. My time spent debating which keyword to use could’ve been spent on other projects, or on eating sandwiches. As before, switching from “How do I” to “How do you” or even “How to” made relatively little difference. Google even understood that “DA” is frequently substituted for “Domain Authority” in our industry.
Perhaps counterintuitively, adding “Moz” made more of a difference. This is because it shifted the SERP to be more brand-like (Moz.com got more mentions). Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, my post still ranked #1. Looking at the entire first page of the SERPs, though, adding the brand name caused a pretty clear intent shift.
The long tail is dead. Long live the long tail.
In the past decade, the long tail has exploded and then imploded (in many ways, due to the same forces), and yet somehow we’ve landed in a very different keyword universe. So, where does that leave us — the poor souls fated to wander that universe?
The goods news of this post (I hope) is that we don’t have to work ourselves to death to target the long tail of search. It doesn’t take 10,000 pieces of content to rank for 10,000 variants of a phrase, and Google (and our visitors) would much prefer we not spin out that content. The new, post-NLP long tail of SEO requires us to understand how our keywords fit into semantic space, mapping their relationships and covering the core concepts. While our tools will inevitably improve to meet this challenge (and I’m directly involved in such projects at Moz), our human intuition can go a long way for now. Study your SERPs diligently, and you can find the patterns to turn your own long tail of keywords into a chonky thorax of opportunity.
Exactly how Google uses engagement signals (i.e. clicks and interaction data) is subject to endless SEO debate. The passage above suggests Google uses engagement metrics to train their machine learning models. Google has also admitted to using click signals for both search personalization and evaluating new algorithms.
While many Googlers no doubt work hard to be helpful to the SEO community, they are also under pressure “not to reveal too much detail” about their algorithms out of caution that SEOs will game search results. In reality, Google is never going to tell SEO exactly how they use engagement metrics, no matter how many times we ask.
Most SEO debate focuses on if Google uses organic Click-through Rates (CTR) in its ranking algorithms. If you are interested, AJ Kohn’s piece is particularly outstanding as well as Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday on covering this topic. For a nuanced counter-view, I’d recommend reading this excellent post by Dan Taylor.
To be fair, I believe most of the debate around CTR up to this point has likely been far too simple. Whatever way SEOs think Google uses click data, how Google actually uses clicks is guaranteed to be far more sophisticated than anything we may conceive. This complexity gap gives Google easy deniability, and justification for calling otherwise reasonable SEO theories “made up crap.” (Google may very well say something similar about this article, which is fine.)
Not another CTR debate
At this point, you may think this is another post adding to the CTR debate, but in fact, it’s not. THIS SIMPLY ISN’T THAT POST.
Arguing “if” Google uses click signals leads us down the wrong path. We know Google does, we simply don’t know how. For example, are they direct signals, or used for machine learning training only? Are click signals used in the broader algorithm, or only for personalization?
Instead, lets propose something far more radical, and likely far more helpful to your SEO:
Why you should assume Google uses clicks for ranking
The patent is fascinating from an SEO perspective because it explains how using click signals can be very “noisy” (as Google often says) but describes a process for calculating “long click” and “last click” metrics to cut through the noise and better rank search results.
To be fair, we have no evidence Google uses the processes described in this patent, and even if they did, it would likely be far more sophisticated/nuanced than the process described here.
That said, the patent is riveting because it supports many of the same best SEO practices we’ve advocated for years. So much so that, if you optimized for these metrics, you’d almost certainly improve your SEO traffic and rankings, regardless if Google uses these exact processes or not. Specifically:
More Clicks (“High CTR”): earns you more traffic no matter your rank, and initial clicks form the basis of all subsequent click metrics.
Improved Engagement (“Long Clicks”): almost always a positive sign from your users, and often an indicator of quality as well as being correlated with future visits.
User Satisfaction (“Last Click”): the holy grail of SEO, and ultimately the experience Google strives to deliver in its search results.
We can summarize these principles into 3 tenets of click-based engagement metrics for SEO: First, Long, and Last.
Let’s explore each of these in turn.
1. Be the first click: earning high CTRs
As stated earlier, this isn’t a debate if Google uses CTR. There’s plenty of evidence that they monitor and consider clicks in a variety of ways. (And to be fair, there’s evidence that they don’t use CTR as extensively as many SEOs believe.)
Even if CTR isn’t a ranking signal, having a higher CTR is almost always good for SEO, because it means getting more clicks and more eyeballs on your content.
Besides the inherent value of earning a high CTR, clicks also form the basis of subsequent click-based metrics, including long clicks and last clicks. So earning that first click is an essential step.
How to earn higher click-through rates
Your ability to earn a higher CTR is almost entirely contained with optimizing your appearance in Google search results. How your snippet stands out and gets noticed for being a likely helpful, relevant answer—in a sea of other competing results—is the name of the game.
You may think your options at influencing CTR in this way are quite limited, but in fact, you have many, many surprisingly powerful levers to pull in your favor, including:
What about artificially manipulating your CTR, either using bots or one of the many blackhat click services you can find on the web? More often than not, these tactics lead to disappointing results. One possible reason why is that Google is very skilled at sniffing out “unnatural” browsing behavior.
So high CTR can be a good thing, but the fact remains—as Google has told us countless times—CTR is a “noisy” signal to use for ranking. Should a result with a flashy title be rewarded simply because users click on it, even if the actual page provides a lackluster experience?
In truth, while earning clicks is one of the primary goals of SEO, the “noise” of the signal is probably why Google avoids using CTR as a direct ranking signal itself.
In fact, earning a high CTR if your content leads to a poor user experience may actually hurt you in the end. More on this below.
So first, we need to figure out if our clicks create a good user experience. Read on…
2. Earn long clicks
So what if you trick people into clicking your URL, but your page actually doesn’t deliver what you promised, or even adequately answer the query.
This isn’t good for users, or for Google. And it definitely isn’t good for you.
One measure of content relevancy search engines can use is weighted viewing time, based on the concept that users typically spend a bit longer time on a site they find relevant, versus a page they find not helpful. Within this framework, “long clicks” can carry more weight than “short clicks.”
“But Cyrus,” smart SEOs protest, “not every query needs a long click. Many searches, like the weather or the “highest mountains in Europe,” can be answered very quickly, often in seconds. It doesn’t make sense for these pages to have long clicks.”
Those SEOs are right, of course. Fortunately, Google engineers understood not every query is the same and devised a clever solution: click scores can be weighted on a per-query basis, including language and country-specific click data.
“Note that such categories may also be broken down into sub-categories as well, such as informational-quick and informational-slow: a person may only need a small amount of time on a page to gather the information they seek when the query is “George Washington’s Birthday”, but that same user may need a good deal more time to assess a result when the query is “Hilbert transform tutorial”
To dive a little deeper, it’s not so much how long visitors stay on your page, but your ratio of long clicks (LC) to overall clicks (C), weighted on a per-query basis. This LC|C ratio could be used to re-rank queries based on user-engagement.
Take this a step further: results with good long-click ratios may rank higher, while results with poor long-click ratios may rank lower.
So consider a situation where you “hacked” your CTR to earn more clicks, but the page itself doesn’t deliver, resulting in more short clicks. In theory, this could actually hurt your rankings, even though you started with a higher CTR!
So be sure to back up your higher CTRs with great user experiences, e.g. long clicks.
How to optimize for long clicks
Many SEOs refer to long clicks as analogous to improving your “dwell time”, or simply the amount of time a user spends on your site. The signals associated with improving dwell time are often known as “UX” (User Experience) signals.
The golden rule of getting more long clicks is simply this: provide the most useful, complete, and engaging answer to a user search query, in the most attractive and effective format possible.
A note of distinction: because most pages rank for multiple keywords, and multiple keyword variations, all with possibly varying search intent, it’s often helpful to target for those various search intents all on the same page.
For example, a user searching for information about meta descriptions may also be interested in “meta description length”, “meta description format” and “how to write meta descriptions.” Optimizing more completely for these varying search intents can improve your long click metrics.
Pro Tip: You don’t need to optimize for every user intent on the same page. Linking to other resources on your site is fine, and even encouraged! Visitors don’t have to stay on the same page for a search click to count as “long.”
Aside from the quality of the content itself, there are a number of UX factors you can employ to encourage your visitors to engage with your content at a deeper level. While not an exhaustive list, a few examples may include:
Prominently link to closely related topics to cover multiple searcher intents. These can be internal links, or even external links.
Admittedly, there aren’t a ton of good excellent resources published on increasing engagement and improving long clicks. That said, I believe Brian Dean of Backlinko does an excellent job with this, and his resource on improving dwell time is worth checking out.
3. Be the last click
Yes, being the last click may be the holy grail of SEO.
A user clicks their way through a page of search results, not finding what they are looking for. Finally, they click on your URL and behold!…. You have the answer they sought.
Put simply, being the last click means searchers don’t return to Google to select another result (e.g. pogo sticking.)
Even if Google doesn’t use this as a ranking factor, you can see how it might benefit your SEO to be the user’s last click as much as possible. Satisfying the user query means users are more likely to browse and share your content, as well as seek you out again in the future.
How to be the last click
In my own SEO, there are fewer things I’ve seen associated with greater success than improving visitor satisfaction, and this is exactly what Google seeks to reward.
It’s also damn difficult to achieve.
Sadly, a typical process in SEO is to give a content brief to a copywriter, expect them to cover all the salient points, hit publish, and hope for the best. But more often than not, do you believe this content truly deserves to rank #1? Is this the first, last, and only result a user needs to click?
Years ago when working in a successful restaurant, a manager gave me advice about delivering 100% customer satisfaction that I will never forget: “Whatever happens, make sure they want to come back.”
This is how you should treat SEO: make sure every visitor to your site wants to come back.
Exactly how to make sure your visitor wants to come back is going to vary based on each and every query, but generally, it means going the extra mile, answering questions more completely, and offering the user more resources and a better experience.
In short, deliver an experience superior to every one of your competitors.
Beyond this, I recommend these 3 resources when improving your content (all amazingly from Rand Fishkin):
To be honest, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure click-based signals, as Google holds all the data.
(Even if you could accurately measure your long click/click ratio, or last click metrics, calculating their actual value would be meaningless without an accurate account of every other Google search result, let alone on a per-query basis.)
That said, there are metrics that can help you directionally measure any progress you might make. These are all available either through Search Console or Google Analytics:
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a “good” score for these numbers, as everything is relative to the specific query it appeared for, as well as every single one of your competitors.
Regardless, these metrics can be directionally useful indicators when making improvements to your content. For example, if you see a drop in bounce rate and increase in session duration after a major content update, you can take this as an indicator that things are moving in the right direction. And in fact, it’s not unusual to see an increase in rankings/traffic after such a change accompanied by a positive shift in metrics.
While we can’t directly see what Google might measure in terms of complex click metrics, we can often make educated guesses.
And even if Google isn’t using these metrics exactly the way we speculate, we can still improve our SEO by paying attention to the user click behaviors we have influence over.
Thanks for making it this far. Remember:
Be First
Be Long
Be Last
Get those clicks, and earn them!
Appendix A: Evidence of Google using click-based ranking signals (incomplete list)
2020 was a very challenging year for everyone, with Covid-19 causing the global economy to plummet. As a result, brick-and-mortar companies and businesses with a limited online presence had to seriously consider their digital marketing strategy.
However, many businesses jumped on the bandwagon without carefully planning out their strategy. So, they ended up blowing their budget on driving traffic through ads without first building a solid foundation—an optimized website.
Now is the time, more than ever, to master your digital marketing strategy to get your business in front of more eyes. But strap yourself in for a journey rather than a two-stop trip—digital marketing is not a one-off effort, but rather an ongoing objective that needs daily monitoring.
So, what steps should you take to get your digital marketing campaign off the ground?
I could’ve simply said that you need a website, but what you need is an online environment that is secure, has a clear structure and works fast.
Here are three vitally important things any modern website needs:
• Speed: Create a clear site structure so that people can quickly find what they need. And with Google confirming that Core Web Vitals will be ranking signals in May 2021, you must pay extra attention to how users experience the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of your site’s pages.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Desktop searches fell behind mobile back in 2017, with over 55% of global web traffic now falling on mobile devices. Moreover, mobile is no longer a growing trend, but the norm, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, don’t even think about going online.
• Security: Web security is critical in preventing hackers and cyber-thieves from getting access to sensitive data, including that of your users. Without a proactive security strategy and an HTTPS connection, businesses risk the development of malware attacks and attacks on other sites, networks and so on.
Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t easy, but it’s essential when it comes to digital marketing. Don’t think that a set-it-and-forget-it approach will work here. You need to be consistent so that potential customers can always find your website for relevant searches.
2. Get On Google My Business
Another way to help customers find you is through Google My Business (GMB).
Google My Business puts your details where potential customers can find them more easily. It also puts your business on Google Maps where it can be reviewed. This can also ensure your business is ranking on the map alongside other similar businesses, giving you a massive boost in visibility, thanks to the Google Local Pack. Optimizing a GMB account is trickier than it looks to begin with. But there are plenty of sources online that provide extensive guides on this topic.
3. Social Media Profiles And Activity
Besides being on Google, you need to actively engage your audience on social media. Think of the difference between eating at a chain restaurant or at a small local one. You never see chefs at restaurant chains, but at your local diner, if a chef talks to you, you find out more about the place and the ingredients used, and unless the food’s awful, you’re likely to spread the word and go back. As a small business, this is the approach you need to take on social networks: Actually talk to and engage with your customers.
Learn what social media platform is popular among your potential customers and get on it too. The most obvious option, Facebook, even has tools for promoting business pages to segmented audiences. If your clients use Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram, expand your presence there too. This is something business owners may need help with, as the most effective way to grow an audience on social media is to consistently create and publish interesting, engaging content.
And if your audience has migrated to newer platforms like TikTok or Clubhouse, try them out. The point is, follow your audience to attract the right traffic.
4. Figure Out What’s Right For Your Business: SEO Or PPC
Before making a decision, assess your financial capabilities and understand if you need to go for search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising or both at the same time.
SEO and PPC are both digital marketing strategies that ultimately get your site to appear on Google page one. But to yield positive results, both strategies need a lot of expertise, tech knowledge and a marketing budget.
PPC is perfect for quick sales if you have a new website that isn’t performing well in organic search, if you think you have a great product/service and want to test it out or if you have reasonable profit margins.
On the flip side, SEO is what you need if you’re looking for long-term growth and can afford to invest in it, if you want to build up your brand over time or if you want to optimize your marketing costs.
Unlike with paid advertising, once you start ranking at the top of Google searches using SEO, you’ll start driving high-quality traffic to your business at no cost. In PPC, you won’t get any clicks if you don’t regularly fork over a small fortune.
Alternatively, you can choose to do SEO and PPC at the same time. This totally depends on your opportunities.
Everything covered here is fundamental to boosting your business’s online visibility. For businesses new to digital marketing, these steps may feel huge to begin with, but once you get the hang of it, it will seem as natural as wearing a seatbelt in a car. With the right set of tools—a well-optimized website, a Google My Business account, an active social media presence and constantly-published engaging content—you can drive web traffic, generate new sales and even get customers to fall in love with your brand.
