Your business has a website, but are you putting it to good use? Is your website working on getting you new leads and helping people find your brand?
It’s not enough to just have a website; you have to optimize your website so that people can find it. With the right SEO solutions, you can get the audience you want and start making conversions. Read on to learn more about SEO and developing a content marketing plan.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves strategies and optimizations on your website that help your site rank higher as searches are made. If you are not showing up on the search engines, your website is not doing much for you.
Users no longer get online and enter a URL to find what they need. Instead, they turn to a search engine and ask a question. If your site is near the top of their search, consumers will visit your site and then you get the chance to convert them into customers.
If you’re able to be noticed by people who are searching for solutions that you can offer, that means even more business for you. SEO can make that happen.
SEO involves:
- how your website is structured
- the content you create
- how you create content
- technical aspects of your site
If you want to get organic traffic to your site, you will need to attend to all elements of SEO.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the easiest ways to grow your business. It involves the creation of various types of content, such as blog posts, lead magnets, video and social media posts to build your brand and get people to your website.
Content marketing is about getting your content seen by as many people as possible. This can be done through search engines, social media platforms or both. Many companies use content marketing as their chief marketing strategy and spend very little time on traditional forms of marketing like television ads.
How Does SEO Marketing Work?
SEO marketing uses SEO best practices to optimize your website so that it shows up in search engines. Again, it’s not about users searching for your brand and finding your website. Instead, it’s about people searching for solutions and finding your brand.
SEO is all about targeting keywords or terms that users enter into a search engine and getting your website to rank for those keywords. Users will then click through to your website, discover your brand and hopefully become a customer.
There are several ways that you can optimize your site for keywords and get your site ranking at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You should write and organize your content so that the search engines understand the type of users who will benefit from your content. You should also optimize your site for ease of use. What would be the point of consumers finding your site if they can’t navigate easily?
What Are the Benefits of SEO Marketing?
There are many benefits to SEO marketing. When your website and content are optimized correctly, you can attract both customers who have heard of your brand and customers who haven’t. Ultimately, you will attract many more customers than relying on your brand alone.
Not only will you attract customers, but you will also attract the right customers. You don’t just want people to view your site; you want people who need your services. For example, if you sell video editing software for Macs and a user searches for “best video editing software for Mac” and lands on your site, you have just made contact with a person who is ready to buy.
SEO improves your website and, as a result, it improves user experience. Websites with better user experiences tend to get repeat visitors.
Lastly, in many cases, SEO solutions are much cheaper than other forms of marketing. You may wind up spending much more on paid advertisements and other traditional forms of marketing.
Contributors to SEO
There are many contributing factors to SEO, including both on-page and off-page optimization.
On-Page Optimization
Before you begin your on-page optimization, you must first find your keywords. Keywords are search terms that users are likely to input into a search engine. You will want to choose keywords in your business’s niche or specific market.
We put in hours and hours of research to determine the most productive keywords for your business and its content.
Specific keywords are easier to rank for on Google and bring in the type of users who are ready to make a purchase.
As we analyze keywords, we look for keywords that have lower competition and a higher monthly search volume. If major websites are ranking for a particular keyword, a newer site will not be able to outrank them. Your keywords need a decent monthly search volume – if no one is searching for a term, no one will make it to your page.
Once we have a solid set of keywords, we then build your content around them. With every update to its algorithm, Google strives to rank pages that provide true value to the reader, so the primary goal should be creating quality content.
Many content creators use the skyscraper method to develop content. Basically, you see what content is already ranking on Google and then create content that is even better and even more informative. To optimize your content, we make sure to include your target keyword throughout the body of the content.
In addition to your keywords, we’ll also use synonyms to further reinforce your page’s topic to search engines. Content will include short paragraphs, bulleted lists and videos (when applicable). We always aim to make your content long and full of value. When users stay on your page for a long time, it sends a signal to Google that the page contains quality information.
Since linking plays a big role in SEO, it is important to include a few relevant internal links to other posts on your site and several external links to high-authority websites.
Off-Page Optimization
The other half of your SEO solution concerns off-page optimization, also known as SEO. Off-page optimization concerns everything outside of the content itself.
One of the biggest factors concerns user experience. You want your website to be easy for users to read and navigate in every respect. While search engines do not necessarily rank for user experience, it does pay attention to a user’s time on the page. If a user quickly leaves your site, it sends a signal to Google that something is wrong.
You should regularly check to make sure both your internal and external links are working. Google may penalize you if your site has a lot of broken links. If their bots cannot get to your page, there isn’t a way to rank it.
Now that over half of the users are on a mobile phone, you want your site to be optimized for mobile. Google gives preference to sites that work on mobile as well as desktop.
Many people worry about their safety while online, so search engines tend to prioritize sites that have a security certificate. These URLs begin with https://. You can check with your web host about getting a security certificate. Or if you use a host like Nexcess it comes with your hosting plan and you don’t have to take any extra steps to get it connected.
Site load speed is also a big rank factor. Today’s internet users want websites to load immediately. If your site takes too long to load, users will hit the back button. Google will think your site doesn’t have valuable information and will lower your SERP position.
There are several tools that will check your page speed. Some tools will even give you tips for what may be slowing your site down so that you can fix any problems.
Getting backlinks, or getting other websites to link to you, increases your domain authority, and tells Google that you may be a good source. The Google bots figure that if other sites are linking to you, you must have valuable information.
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO
In the world of content marketing, there are a couple of ways to go about SEO: black hat and white hat.
Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO goes against search engine guidelines in order to get visitors to a site. Black Hat SEO is strongly discouraged. Search engines will penalize your site for using Black Hat SEO. We never ever ever use these tactics at Content Journey.
Black Hat SEO involves a set of methods that usually “trick” the user or the search engine in some way. Paid backlinks are one of the biggest indiscretions. Google often bases rank on backlinks, so Black Hat SEOs often get involved in PBNs or Private Blog Networks. You can actually purchase backlinks, but Google works to find these PBNs and will penalize you if found on your site.
Many Black Hat SEOs will create content by copying or spinning other sites’ information. This is plagiarism. Search engines value unique content.
Since websites are trying to rank for keywords, some Black Hat SEOs try to trick the search engines by keyword stuffing. This process involves using a keyword as many times as possible to try to rank for that keyword. It can often make the text unreadable and, therefore, not useful. Some site owners would even try to hide keywords as white text on a white background. Search engines can now detect all of these methods and will not rank these sites.
Cloaking involves showing one URL to the search engine bots while taking a user to another site. Or, a user may be taken to a keyword-optimized site, only to then be taken to another site that is unrelated. Both of these techniques are heavily penalized.
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO involves the best practices we have listed here. You are not doing anything underhanded, but instead writing quality content and developing a website that is easy for users to navigate. You are also structuring your content and site so search engines can get a good idea of the users you are trying to serve.
Choosing a Content Provider
While you can handle all of the content and optimization for your website yourself, it is a long and difficult process. It can be an even more arduous process if you’re not familiar with SEO best practices. Furthermore, content creation can be quite time-consuming.
As a business owner, you know how much time and effort is involved in the running of your business. There is always something to do – optimizing and maintaining a website for SEO is a job in itself. By choosing Content Journey to handle your content marketing needs, you can focus on other aspects of your business.
By integrating SEO and content creation, you can be assured that your content is both of the highest quality and is perfectly optimized. We also help you track data on your website to get the most out of your content marketing campaign.
Key Takeaways
SEO for your business’s website is no longer an option. It is a necessary part of running a website if you want users to find you. SEO is a complicated process, but essentially it comes down to creating an optimal user experience.
You create a good user experience by developing quality content that is centered around solving problems for your potential customers. This content should be thorough and easy to understand. It should also be optimized around a particular keyword so that Google knows which users to point to your site.
You also enhance the user experience by developing a website that loads quickly, is easily viewable on a range of devices, and is easy to navigate. It is important to use sanctioned practices to rank your site to avoid being penalized by search engines.
Hiring a content marketing agency is a big decision – one that will have a positive impact on your brand. Ensuring you hire an agency that is experienced is crucial. It is just as important, however, to feel supported in your relationship with a firm.
Not only do we pride ourselves on our research and development, we strive to create long-lasting and supportive relationships with all of our clients.
If you are ready to join us and take your content to the next level, book a call with us today.
