Despite being aware of the powers of SEO, very few startups actually, make use of it. Small business owners not only keep away from investing in internet marketing but the strange thing is that almost 39 percent small businesses do not make any investment in marketing at all. Today, a tiny fraction of small businesses (17%) adopts SEO strategy and includes it as a part of their marketing campaign. On the contrary, as a small business owner, you can benefit immensely from search engine optimization that has incredible powers of driving customers to your business. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to include SEO in your business agenda much at an earlier stage so that your business garners attention right from the start.
Think about SEO in long term
For small businesses, it is most important to adopt a strategy for search engine optimization by keeping in mind the long-term gains. It will be a mistake to expect that it can work magic overnight because it needs sustained effort to gain the momentum in online marketing. How long it takes is hard to tell, but you have to wait for quite a few months if results do not show up earlier. However, with the right strategy, you can expect things to look up sooner than you expect. You must have the right attitude about implementing SEO and stay focused with the understanding that perseverance pays back in internet marketing. The goal should be to keep your business optimized for searches at all times. How to do it will be clear as you go through this article.
Follow the best practices
The problem with search engines is that they never reveal the search algorithms and users often try to decipher it in their ways. A kind of reverse engineering helps to some extent to know about the ways search engines work so that you can position your search optimization campaign accordingly. However, the problem with this approach is that this method might work in the short term only because search engines keep on changing the algorithms frequently. What works for you today will not work tomorrow. Instead of trying to crack algorithms, focus on an approach that is more constructive and try to adopt the best practices suggested by Google.
- Quality content – Focus on providing the best quality content that offers the most useful and relevant information to users. Publish well-researched content and share insights that add value to users. Promote your content well so that it grabs eyeballs and users become eager to share it.
- Distribution Strategy – Promoting your content through proper distribution is a task that you can never afford to ignore. Give the maximum exposure to your brand by participating in popular forums and communities within your industry niche. Identify journalists and influencers who take an interest in your company and make sure to present your business to them in an impressive manner. This would create the buzz that you want to ring in the ears of consumers who would find reasons to buy your product or service.
- Stick to the basics – Instead of trying to cut corners, stick to the basics and pay attention to foundational SEO to look for opportunities. Follow Google guidelines for understanding the rules on how they index pages and find it out during search results and practice it sincerely. This is the easiest way to catch Google’s attention.
Customize organic search snippet
If you observe the search results carefully, you will find that along with the links; there are search snippets provided in the results. The snippets allow users to have a sneak peek into the content covered by the link so that it saves time to understand its relevance. Snippets are therefore quite critical because users decide whether to click on the link by looking at snippets. It creates the highest impacting first impression that goes a long way in making business happen. As a business owner, you must take complete ownership of snippets and pay attention to it so that the right information reaches the users. If you are not updating the snippets regularly, Google will do it for you by extracting data from the page’s Meta description, and this is when problems start. Google might collate negative information to compose the snippet, and this might have an adverse impact on users. Any SEO Company will advise you to take utmost care in producing snippets packed with favorable reviews, ratings, images and other links so that it attracts viewers to the website.
Redirect dead links
Streamlining URLs is a healthy activity, but it can have far-reaching implications if not done properly. The links to your blogs are spread everywhere across various other websites that have cited it and helped to drive more traffic to your site. Whenever you make changes in the URL of your blogs, you must remember that the new look should not only be clean and impressive but at the same time, it must be useful. It should not happen that the change robs the URL of its usefulness and as a result, users are lead to dead pages. To avoid any mishaps with modified URLs, the right way of doing it is to identify dead links and redirect it to the right places. Make sure that no one gets a 404 not found the error.
Avoid duplicate content through consolidation
Duplicate content can harm search rankings because the same keywords that help pages earn ranks appear at different places and compete with one another. The ideal thing is to make pages work in unison without conflict for which it is important to identify duplicate content and consolidate it into a single content. Eradicating duplicate content translates into fewer pages that make it easy for Google to index content and reflects in better ranks.
SEO is not for marketing only even though it is the primary goal. Its ability to support a strong PR campaign helps in establishing brands that flourish under the powers of a robust marketing platform. It paves the way for the success of business in long term.
About the author – Edward Carter is the founder CEO of an SEO company that specializes in internet marketing. He is a strong believer in innovating new ways of interpreting SEO and writes regularly about it. A sportsman at heart, he takes off time from work to practice his golfing skills.