Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Marketing for Lead Generation
Successful marketers can attest to the web’s ability to deliver qualified leads to your door. Do you know what else they can vouch for? The fact that achieving success online takes a lot of persistence.
Particularly with search engine optimization (SEO), eventuating the results can take anywhere from 6-12 months. Of course, the good thing is that in the long run, your effort gets paid off in spades; unless you are a seasonal business, then that’s a different story. But seriously, you really wouldn’t want to be inconsistent.
The online competition in various industries has been continuously growing. If you want to stay ahead of the game or at least be fully equipped to fight the battles, you must certainly pay attention to your SEO strategies. And before we delve into it, let us first define SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimisation is the art and science of cracking local search online. It is a strategy that helps websites achieve higher placements in search engines. By search engines, we are talking about major leagues such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
A well-optimised web page is more discoverable, drives higher traffic, and generates more leads. It enables your website to rank on the first pages of search engines when someone searches for your business or keywords that are relevant to you. Imagine being the first business people see when they search for “Best digital marketing agency in Auckland” on Google. Don’t you think users will click the first link that appears on the search results page?
If you know the answer to this question, then you ultimately have an idea of SEO’s importance to all types of businesses.
Let’s go through a few of the many benefits SEO offers to businesses like yours.
Why is SEO so Important?
There are endless benefits of using SEO. To give you a clearer picture, we’ve listed the top reasons why search engine optimisation can do wonders for your website’s ROI:
- 72% of consumers who did a local search visited a store or business within five miles. You can harness the power of local search and hone down your ads to geo-targeted areas to turn warm leads into actual clients!
- SEO makes your website an authority site for consumers. It boosts your credibility with leads and with big search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
- Organic search results still drive 51% of traffic. These types of results are listings on search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear based on their relevance to search terms, as opposed to them being paid advertisements. This stat means more opportunities for your unpaid and naturally optimised web pages to obtain a high placement on search engine results.
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. It should always be your aim to be one of the firsts to rank on SERPs, and an efficient and effective SEO strategy will help you achieve just that.
- SEO is a significant inbound marketing strategy of which the primary goal is to help you reach people who will most likely be interested in buying or taking advantage of your products and services, consequently aiding you to capture hot leads.
Clearly, if you want to generate more leads and grow your business with a longer-term focus, making use of search engine optimisation is something that you should consider. In fact, to give you more valuable insights, let’s tackle the most helpful tips on how to establish a highly effective SEO strategy.
What Makes a Great SEO Strategy?
A grand SEO strategy relies on high-quality content, fine-tuned technical expertise, and a robust website structure. Here are some of the best practices when optimising your website for search engines:
Create a Link-Building Strategy
The number of quality sites linking back to your website is a huge factor in how a search engine ranks your web pages. A great way to attract inbound links from prominent websites is by sharing your links with them in exchange for links to their sites. Another way is to use your blog to post articles related to current events or news in your business area. Through this, you get a shot of being linked to from an industry influencer or blogger.
Set Up a High-Quality Blog
Every blog post means a new web page that can rank in search engines. Your blog posts are a great chance to boost your website’s ranking in more keywords or search terms as possible. Remember, you are still blogging for your audience and not the search engines. Do not overstuff your content with keywords. Instead, write about the things that your prospects are interested in. For search engines to find your website valuable, your content should provide useful information and answers to search queries.
Constantly Track Your SEO Success
Keep your SEO plan on track and measure your success through metrics that give you a daily, weekly, or monthly report on your site traffic. Tracking the average time users spent on your site, your inbound links, your keywords, and actual ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) will help you identify areas of opportunity. Google offers free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to help you collect website data that results in actionable insights.
Since you already have a better grasp of how SEO works and how it is essential, let’s now discuss how we can make search engine optimisation work for your business.
Making SEO Work For Your Business
There are two types of optimisation which will drive SEO success for your website. They are referred to as on-site and off-site optimisation.
ON-SITE OPTIMISATION
On-site optimisation is all about optimising every little detail of your website for your target keywords. Your blog posts should be tailored to specific keywords with high search volume and relevance to your audience. Free research tools available online like Google Trends & Google Keyword Planner can help you determine popular keywords to use.
The key to staying ahead of the competition is to work with the ever-increasing SEO trends. Search engine algorithms rule the roost. Plan your marketing strategies around this to succeed and get results. SEO efforts begin with targeting the right local keywords on your site to improve your search rankings. This process involves the following:
- Meta Tag Optimisation: Meta tags are snippets of text that describe the page’s content and show up in search results. You can optimise your meta information to improve your ranking. A good character limit of 70 characters for the meta title and 155 characters for the meta description will ensure these display without issue.
- Image Optimisation: Optimising images for SEO can bring in organic traffic via search engine image results. This also improves page loading times which is a great bonus!
- Content Writing/Optimisation: Content writing for SEO is a form of writing that helps your website become more visible to major search engines like Google and Bing. A highly visible website with good content will be on the first few pages of results when a user searches for that topic.
- Implementing Search Engine-friendly URLs and Navigation: Using SEO-friendly structures is one of the most fundamental search engine optimisation techniques. A good URL structure can help the indexation process of your website.
- Utilisation of Google Search Console and Analytics: Google Search Console and Analytics is a free tool that gives you valuable information about your website and the people who visit it.
- Internal Link Optimisation: An internal link is a link that points to another page on the same domain. Internal linking helps in user navigation and improves ranking power around websites.
- Installation of SSL Certificate: In 2014, Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal to implement an advanced secure connection for users. Having an SSL Certificate is the most convenient thing site owners can do to get search engine rank benefits and increase user trust.
- Ensuring the Website is Fully Responsive for Various Screen Sizes Including Smartphones and Tablets: A responsive web design can benefit your website by improving site usability, faster page speed, and boosted social sharing.
- Optimising Website Performance to Improve Page Loading Times: In 2010, Google announced website speed would begin having a factor in search rankings. If you can optimise your website’s performance, you wouldn’t want to compromise your search ranking by not doing it, would you?
OFF-SITE OPTIMISATION
Off-site SEO is all about ensuring that you receive a significant amount of inbound links from quality external websites. The number of external sites that link back to your site is an indicator of good content. If highly-respected sites think your website is worth linking to, major search engines will give you a higher ranking.
Here are three excellent methods to generate quality backlinks from reputable sites:
- Link Building/Business Listing Submission: One of the most effective strategies in increasing your search engine rankings is through citations. This can be done by reaching out and link building with owners of other websites and blog sites along with setting up referral incentives between each other. Options include reaching out to third-party businesses (e.g. service providers, suppliers, industry partners) and building partnerships. This helps users discover your business and impact your overall search engine rankings.
- Business Site Listing Submissions: Another way of ranking your local business is by submitting your business information to business listing sites. Quality listing websites or directories in New Zealand such as Hotfrog can help you rank in Google. Citations on directories will help Google know more about you. What’s more is that local consumers visit these sites as well to search for businesses in their area. This gives you a chance to build a working relationship with them which may lead to referrals.
- Google My Business/Google Maps Optimisation/Local Search Optimisation: With Google My Business, you can improve your local SEO. Google My Business is Google’s one-stop site to manage your business’ performance in the search engine. It helps you identify and adjust how your business shows in Google Maps, Google+, and organic search results.
So, for you to be successful in optimising the search engine for your website, you need both on-site and off-site optimisation strategies. The secret is quality content, constant data analysis, and consistent tracking of the performance of your SEO efforts.
Of course, it takes time to learn and master all the ins and outs of search engine optimisation, but there’s nothing to sweat about. If you need our help, we are more than happy to assist you. As a matter of fact, we can get you qualified leads on autopilot.
Get Qualified Leads on Autopilot with SEO
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