Your search engine optimization (SEO) may not be up to par, but you have several options to reclaim its glory. A few minor changes can make your website more successful, especially if you want to attract more qualified customers and gain a competitive edge in today’s fast-growing digital world. Here are our top 3 suggestions.
Optimize your website for mobile devices
Search engines have been steadily moving toward a mobile-first index. Numbers don’t lie – according to Statista, 47.28% of the web traffic in the U.S in the last quarter of 2021. And that number will only increase as more people get smartphones and tablets.
The most important step in optimizing your website for mobile users is to ensure it’s responsive, which automatically adjusts its layout to fit any screen size.
You’ll also want to ensure your site loads quickly on mobile devices, as people are less likely to wait around for it to load when they’re on the go. Make sure its text is easily read on small screens and underpinned by plenty of white spaces.
Create Relevant and Quality Content
Content is the foundation of any SEO strategy for small businesses. Create pages where readers can quickly and easily find the information they want. As such, visitors spend more time on your website while providing you with the opportunity to cash in on superior user experiences.
Good content will get people talking about your business because they trust you as an authority on the subject matter. With trust comes action, such as subscribing to your blogs, downloading your e-book, or buying your product.
Start with conducting comprehensive keyword research—finding popular terms in your niche. Next, create keyword-rich copy targeting the people looking for products and services like yours. But again, use the keywords naturally throughout the copy.
As for the quality, make your content informative. Include lots of valuable information that people can use daily, not just vague descriptions of what your company does. Your content should also be accurate, easy to read, and up-to-date. You can always use the help of a reputable content writing service.
Use Videos
Google cares about videos, and so should you. Blending text and videos gives Google the impression that your site is informative, boosting your search rankings. You can use videos as a traffic generator, as there are high chances of people visiting your site after watching your video on YouTube or other social media channels.
Videos are an important asset for any business website, especially if you sell products or services that are hard to explain with text or simple graphics. An Orbelo study found that 54% of customers anticipate more video content from their favorite brands, and over 86% of marketing pros consistently use video as a marketing tool.
Incorporate video in product descriptions, on your homepage, and anywhere else you can embed it into your pages. You can use them for tutorials and other educative material that can benefit customers who may not be tech-savvy or find written instructions difficult to follow.
Bottom Line
If you want your target audience to find your small business website, you must pay attention to your SEO strategy. As you dive deeper into the SEO world, there’s much to learn and implement. Get started with the above recommendations.
Isn’t it frustrating not to drive traffic to your website despite putting so much effort into keyword research and content creation? Isn’t it sickening enough to see your competition command all the visibility and attention online? Your pain ends here with this guide.
Keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy. But despite many business owners knowing this, they are yet to grasp the ins and outs of finding keywords that will drive traffic and leads to their websites. Consequently, they experience low revenue generation while losing plenty of business to their competitors ahead of the curve.
You do not have to keep losing revenue opportunities to low online visibility. This guide gives you practical keyword research tips you can leverage for your business or your client’s business. Let’s dive right in.
1. Analyze Your Business and Customers
The first keyword research step is understanding your business and customers. You want to determine what makes your business tick: financial stability, unique products, dedicated staff, or anything else.
Understanding your business helps you align relevant keywords with your business goals. For example, if you want to drive more organic traffic to your website, you might target high-volume or trend-based keywords. In contrast, niche, local, and how-to keywords are best suited for lead generation.
Understand how potential customers search for businesses/products like yours online. From there, create content that suits the keywords your customers use.
Another integral part of analyzing your customers is building buyer personas. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and contain quantifiers like:
Demographics
Behavioral traits
Challenges
Stage of life
Spending power
Interests
Take your time to create thorough customer profiles. That way, you understand your target buyers’ needs and appeal to them better.
2. Determine the Query Intent
Organic results are primarily based on what the search engines interpret to be the searcher’s intent. There exist three common types of search queries:
Informational Query
With informational queries, searchers are not looking for a particular website or intending to make a commercial transaction- they are simply looking for answers to questions or guides to perform particular tasks.
An example of an informational query would be “making coffee.”
To effectively target informational queries, offer helpful, industry-related content optimized with long-tail keywords. This will help your content perform well on search engines for relevant but less competitive queries.
Navigational Query
A navigational query suffices when an individual looks for a specific website or webpage. For example, when you enter “facebook” into the Google search bar to find the Facebook site rather than type the site’s URL.
A navigational query has vivid intent and isn’t easy to target unless you own the website a user is looking for. The searcher has the specific website in mind; if it’s not yours, you stand no chance of ranking in the organic results.
To know whether you need to optimize for navigational queries, search for your company on Google. If it ranks at the top of organic results, you are good to go. If not, optimize your website to ensure Google finds relevant information about your company. For this purpose, include business-specific information like brand name, services, products, and location.
Another trick is running PPC ads for your business to ensure your site appears on top of your brand’s navigational query results. See how Harmony Home Medical does this below:
Transactional Query
Searchers perform a transactional query if they intend to complete a transaction, such as a purchase. These queries may include terms like “order,” “buy,” or “purchase,” or specific brand names and products like “Tecno Spark 5 Air”. A generic like “iced coffee maker” can also work. Many local searches are transactional, for example, “San Diego Medical Equipment Supplier.”
To optimize your product listings or service pages for transactional queries, ensure you include transactional keywords in your content, title tags, image alt text, and more.
3. Create a List of Keywords
Using the knowledge from the discovery stage, build a list of topics relevant to your business, separating these ideas into groups based on their similarity. Understand some keywords are good for informational queries while others will likely lead to a customer transaction.
Using Google Analytics, Search Console, or any other rank tracking tool, check the keywords your business rank for. Skip any branded term. Next, search the search terms on Google and check for their variations in the “People Also Ask” section and related search terms in Google’s organic results.
You can discover more variations using free keyword research tools such as Answer the Public, Google Trends, and more.
It is important to refine and prioritize your phrases. Start with distinguishing between short-tail and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are broad terms often consisting of one or two words and have higher search volume and competition. Long-tail keywords are more descriptive terms comprising three to five or more words and have much lower search volume and competition.
Don’t just focus on short-tail terms with higher search volume. It is difficult to outrank the big boys using these phrases.
Keyword research tools usually indicate keyword difficulty for each phrase. The higher the metric, the harder it is to rank for that particular keyword. Many opportunities lie within the long-tail keywords as consumer searches continue to be more conversational.
Experts recommend targeting short-tail keywords for long-term wins and long-tail phrases for short-term wins. The soft spot is targeting keywords with higher search volume but with keyword difficulty of less than 60%.
4. Analyze Your Competitors
Your competitors have already conducted keyword research, built content, elevated their link-building efforts, and optimized their pages to boost performance. Checking and evaluating their SEO strategies (especially if they perform better online) can greatly help your keyword research process.
The main goal of competitor analysis in keyword research is to identify valuable phrases and concepts. Enter the competitor’s URL in a keyword research tool, and look for metrics that display the value of the phrases your competitors rank for, from keyword difficulty, and potential traffic to CPC (cost per click).
Don’t forget to check the phrases your competitors use in their ad campaigns. If they use phrases with high CPC, it indicates they are valuable phrases with high conversion potential. But don’t ignore their low-CPC terms.
Check Link Profiles
Another way of discovering concepts that matter to your ideal customers is by checking your competitor’s link profiles. If there are content pages with a significantly higher number of inbound links, that indicates the content is valuable to the competitor’s customers and audiences.
Identify unique links too! If a page covering a certain concept receives inbound links, but no other business/website is getting links related to that concept, then you know that’s a worthy concept. And since there is little competition, you can build better content and potentially outrank your competitor.
Additionally, if two or more competitors are getting links to pages about the same idea, look to target that concept on your website.
Evaluate the Pages
Competitor analysis is incomplete without an evaluation of their pages. Study the heading, page structure, and critical optimization elements such as title tags, H1 headings, image alt texts, and meta descriptions.
Analyze the content quality, and determine its readability score. Is it tailored to expert readers or lower comprehension levels? Is it long-form or short-form?
Check how the competitor incorporates visuals in their content. Do they include multiple images? Do they embed videos on their blogs?
5. Create Unique and Valuable Content
Now that you have your keyword lists and know what works for your competitors, start creating content that offers value to your target audience. Create different kinds of content for particular keywords, including blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, guides, etc. You can start with blogs and build your way up to the advanced content types as your business grows. For example, case studies require real-life customer success stories.
Common is the advice that repeating your target keywords as much as possible and in several spots makes it easier for search engine bots to find your pages. This has to be the worst advice you can offer an SEO beginner. The practice is known as keyword stuffing and is focused on manipulating search engine organic listings. Not only does keyword stuffing damage your communication efforts, but it is also highly frowned upon by search engines. The image below illustrates this black-hat SEO technique:
In white-hat SEO, it’s not about stuffing your copy with keywords; it’s about ensuring the terms appear in an appropriate frequency in your copy. Highly recommended keyword practices include:
Placing your target keyword in your title, meta descriptions, H1 and H2 tags(if possible), in the beginning, middle, and end of your copy,
Using at most two unique keywords per page
Starting your title tag with your keyword
Beginning the first sentence of the first paragraph with your keyword
7. Evaluate and Optimize
Evaluate your site and see what’s performing and not working. Check your rank tracking tools to see what draws more attention from users or experiencing higher than normal bounce rates. Check whether you are ranking for certain queries or losing visibility.
Using the evaluation data, dive into on-page optimization, including optimizing your title tags, Hi headings, alt attributes, meta description, and source code. If your web pages are not ranking at all for your target keyword, there could be a few reasons:
Your content quality is lacking.
You need better titles and H1 headings.
The pages need some inbound links from reputable sites in your industry.
To grow your authority and credibility, you must create new content continually and update your old content to align with new trends and information. But always remember, it is quality over quantity when it comes to content marketing success.
Repurpose the old, well-performing content to drive more results. You can tweak an old blog with a new twist or convert a blog into a video.
The Bottom Line
There you have them, practical keyword research tips to drive the customers you want to your website. However, keyword research is not a one-and-done technique. Continually evaluate your website’s performance and look for new keyword opportunities.
If you need help with content marketing for your business, don’t hesitate to drop ContentGenics a message here.
