The Benefits of SEO for Business Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of any business’s overall marketing strategy. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves optimizing content, developing links, and making sure that search engine bots can easily crawl and index a website.

With SEO, businesses can reach more potential customers and increase their online visibility, ultimately resulting in more sales and conversions.

Here are a few of the key benefits of SEO for businesses:

1. Increased Visibility One of the primary benefits of SEO is increased visibility. SEO can help businesses to appear at the top of SERPs, making it easier for potential customers to find them. This increased visibility leads to more traffic on the website, which, in turn, leads to more sales and conversions.

2. More Qualified Leads SEO also helps businesses to generate more qualified leads. Since SEO involves optimizing content for specific keywords, businesses can target potential customers who are actively searching for the products and services they offer. This helps to ensure that the leads they generate are more likely to convert into paying customers.

3. Cost–Effective SEO is also a very cost–effective form of marketing. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, SEO does not require businesses to pay for their placements. Instead, they can focus on optimizing their content and building links to rank higher in SERPs. This makes it a great option for businesses with limited marketing budgets.

In conclusion, SEO is an essential part of any business’s overall marketing strategy. It can help businesses to reach more potential customers, generate more qualified leads, and achieve long–term results at a fraction of the cost of traditional forms of advertising. For these reasons, SEO is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to maximize their online visibility and reach more customers.

COVID19 will NOT DEFEAT US!

Eventually, things will normalize.

It may be different, and there may be a new normal, but the world will stabilize.

And search engine marketing will still be one of the most effective ways to reach consumers.

Those that implement effective search engine marketing programs during the down-times will be primed to clean up when things normalize.

Especially those that invest in search engine optimization.

While you can see results from SEO in a short period of time, the overall effectiveness of SEO doesn’t happen overnight.

It takes time to get an SEO campaign to run effectively.

But in the time that we are dealing with global pandemonium, a business could create an SEO campaign that will reap results for years to come.

And those results could produce the revenue your business needs to make it through the inevitable hard times that are coming.

So I encourage all businesses to either continue or start aggressive search engine marketing efforts.

Search engine marketing is the most effective way to market your business in down-times.

We saw this to be the case in 2009, and things haven’t changed that much.

So get started today.

You’ll thank me tomorrow.

The ugly truth is that it’s hard to reverse momentum once a website starts going in the wrong direction.

Often, businesses want to stop and start SEO.

Some feel that taking a break won’t cause any issues.

But when a client suggests taking a break, you can explain the details of what will happen.

If you stop posting content correctly

When you stop publishing content, the following things happen:

1. You stop targeting new terms consistently. This results in fewer new keyword rankings and new traffic.
2. You stop creating new pages that can be linked to, and the number of links you earn goes down.
3. You stop capturing new visitors to add to your remarketing audiences, email list and push notification list.
4. You stop generating content that can be used to create hub pages, which are master pages that link to all other pages on the topic. These often rank very well.
5. You stop generating content that gets shared on social media, and thus, generates social media shares and traffic.
6. You stop encouraging people to return to your website for new posts. This reduces your branded searches, which are an indicator of quality to Google.

Overall, if you stop creating content, it says to Google that your website is no longer as active as it was and thus beginning the process of dying a slow death.

If you don’t watch for technical issues

Those without web experience often don’t understand that from a technical perspective, things often break for no real reason.

I’ve never seen a website that did not have at least a handful of technical SEO issues.

If you don’t monitor the technical aspects of your site, issues such as the following could arise:

1. You block your website with robots.txt.
2. You generate duplicate content.
3. You accidentally push your development site into the index.

When you don’t monitor these things and fix them consistently, they start to add up. Think of it as a garden – it takes maintenance, or it starts to become overgrown.

It is incredibly important to stay technically correct, especially with new developments such as mobile usability, page speed, AMP and more.

If you don’t, you are sure to have an error at some point that will cost you down the line. Similarly, your tech stack will become so out of date that you can no longer compete in the market.

If you stop refreshing pages

When you refresh a page correctly, traffic will generally increase to that page 10% to 30%, sometimes more.

The reason for this is because Google sees the new text and the value it provides and wants to rank it higher.

Now, there are many ways to go about doing refreshes. Some of those include:

1. Adding FAQs to the page
2. Adding links to other articles
3. Updating facts
4. Updating dates
5. Making the text longer
6. Adding schema
7. Changing a page template
8. Etc.

Lately, the most important thing to look for when refreshing a page is whether or not it matches search intent, and if the page in question is better than the #1 ranking page.

My process includes doing a search, categorizing the query based on intent, analyzing the top pages, creating a new strategy for the page we are trying to get ranked, and refreshing as a result of that.

If you stop building new pages

Building new pages are harder for some industries than others.

For example, when I worked with a few firms in the outsources accounting space, the lower funnel terms were minimal. If you compare that to a large e-commerce site like Amazon, its terms are endless.

While that is the case, I believe websites should always be targeting new terms and organizing them by segment. Those segments should be prioritized based on business goals and tracked in a dashboard.

But if you stop building new pages, you’ll lose keyword growth momentum.

I highly recommend creating these pages for SEO, but additionally, these new pages can be excellent landing pages for paid search and paid media, in general.

As a website grows, it’s a great idea to create more landing pages that target specific keywords and audiences. This will improve quality score on the page side and conversion rates all around.

If you stop this process, you’ll lose your competitive advantage. The people who win in the future of the web will be the ones converting traffic for less.

If you stop watching out for bad links

If you stop doing SEO, your backlink profile can get out of control.

Lately, spammy links are worse than ever before.

When you watch your backlinks, you will see the following happen:

1. People scrape your website content and keep the links in by accident.
2. You get Google alerts from sites hacked by malware.
3. Competitors try to do negative SEO on your site.

If you don’t update your disavow file once a month, you are putting your website rankings at risk. Lately, we have been doing it weekly for clients in competitive spaces.

If you stop watching out for stolen content

Go to your top landing page on your website right now.

Copy a block of text about three sentences long.

Put that text in quotes and search for it in Google. What do you see?

I’ll bet some of you will see other websites coming up for that content. Some might have even stolen from your website.

Now, think about the impact that can have if it happens across multiple pages on your site. Honestly, it can be devastating. Many times we find others have wholly duplicated a website, stolen key pages, or taken individual sections of a page.

When this happens, you need to address it.

1. Rewrite the content on your site.
2. Ask the other site to take it down.
3. File a DMCA on them if needed.
4. Consider sending them a cease and desist.
5. Sometimes, you can contact the hosting company and ask them to remove the site.

Regardless, if you stop watching for stolen content, it could have an extremely negative effect on your business and rankings. This is something you need to catch right away.

Bottom line: Why you should not stop doing SEO

Obviously, you’re not going to stop doing SEO. We all know it is an amazing asset to improve search ranking and help your business grow. The work you do to create and update content along with the technical issues that are easily solved if they’re on your radar, all improve your bottom line. But you also need to ensure you are compliant with privacy regulations if you wish to remain on top.

The ugly truth is that it’s hard to reverse momentum once a website starts going in the wrong direction. I am a firm believer that all things online should be scaled as the business grows, SEO included.

In my line of work, I’m often asked, “What is this SEO thing I’ve been hearing a lot about, and why should I care about it?” These days, businesses already have to worry about website design and social media, so most business owners may not even be aware that search engine optimization (SEO) is a thing. If this sounds like you, then this guide might be of some help.

What is SEO?

Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing your website in order to get organic or unpaid traffic from search engines like Google or Bing. It increases both the quality and the quantity of traffic to your site.

This means making changes to your website’s content and design that will make it rank highly on different search engine results pages. But why should you care about your website being the top result on Google? Why is generating organic traffic better than paying for ads?

The Internet’s Librarians

Imagine that you are one of the librarians for the most complete repository of knowledge and data that humanity has ever created. Imagine that millions of people come to you every day looking for information on a specific subject—for example, on Nietzsche or the Oscars or how to cook the perfect steak.

In order to help each person find the information they are looking for in a fast, efficient manner, you will need to know a bit about what each book in your library is about. You also need to arrange all the books according to some type of system—perhaps alphabetically, year of publication or by topic or keywords.

Search engines act like the internet’s librarians. They try to match the user’s search terms with the most relevant information in their database, and we need to understand how they do this in order to understand why SEO is so important.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines work in three steps. First, they send crawlers through all available content on the internet—webpages, images, audio, video and so on. Crawlers are bots that send snapshots of all accessible content back to the search engine’s servers.

Next, the information is organized into a searchable list. This huge list is called a search index and can serve as the basis for a raw keyword search. But good search engines like Google and Bing go one step further.

These search engines rank all the pieces of content relevant to a searcher’s query, using an algorithm to order the generated list from most relevant to least relevant. These algorithms are always changing, with Google, in particular, making constant adjustments.

Search engines that consistently deliver relevant results gain repeat users. These loyal users learn to depend on that search engine above all others. Recent data shows that Google and Bing make up almost 85% of all internet searches. This indicates a high level of user trust in these search engines.

Getting Ranked

Recent market share statistics show that most people begin their online experiences through a search engine. That’s why it is important for your website to rank highly on search engines: A high rank indicates high relevance, and high relevance brings trust in your brand and your website.

Google determines its ranking through a mix of hundreds of different ranking signals, but three have remained consistent: quality on-page content that satisfies the searcher, links pointing back to your site, and RankBrain, which uses artificial intelligence to simulate a human “gut feel” approach to interpret difficult searches.

Content Marketing

Google and Bing employ metrics such as clicks, page views and time on page to measure the levels of user engagement throughout your website, which indicate how satisfied users are with the information they find on your site.

The more quality—and, therefore, more relevant—content you have on your site, the higher your pages are more likely to be ranked by the search engines. Good content makes satisfied users!

Links To Your Site

Another way search engines measure a website’s relevance is by external sites that link to it. The quality of the backlinks is just as important as quantity, as search engines will ban sites that attempt to spam backlinks.

A better way to build backlinks is to build relationships with the community. Fans and other satisfied users will link back to your website when they write about it and mention it on social media. This builds organic backlinks that are far more valuable than a hundred spam links generated by bots. Quality content is more likely to be shared.

SEO Versus Paid Ads

So, why use SEO instead of other methods of increasing traffic, such as paid ads? After all, Google itself offers a paid AdWords system where advertisers bid on keywords.

It helps to return to the library metaphor we used earlier. Imagine a book’s publisher launching a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign to increase awareness of a new book about, let’s say, building birdhouses. There are television ads and radio spots, print ads in newspapers and Google AdWords for the keyword “how to build birdhouses.”

These campaigns may boost sales of the book temporarily, but eventually marketing campaigns end, and the next clueless nest box enthusiast will have to go down to the local library and ask a librarian to recommend a book on building birdhouses. This librarian will most likely recommend a book that has satisfied previous birdhouse queries before, whether it was a bestseller when it was first released or not.

That’s the beauty of SEO and why it is the foundation of any small business marketing plan. It may take some upfront time and investment to set up properly, with quality content and a network of organic backlinks. But a well-designed website that follows the principles of SEO will continue to generate a steady stream of organic leads and traffic for your business, for free.

FORBES

Technical SEO

Moreover, you shouldn’t forget about technical SEO either! This type of SEO refers to parameters that directly affect the visibility of your website when it comes to how search engines see it.

Because of this, the primary purpose of technical SEO is to make sure that the search engine crawls and properly index and crawl a website without facing any issues.Using technical SEO implies:

• The optimization of your robots.txt file – this very file makes sure that search engines can access your website.

• Verify your website with the Google Search Console, as well as specify your preferred domain.

• Find and fix any crawl errors with the COVERAGE report.

• You should also come up with an XML Sitemap to submit to all the major search engines.

• Last but not least – you should adhere to SEO-friendly web design.

First of all, you have to understand the differences between local and national SEO…

The former is specially designed to boost the ranking of a specific website within a particular area. Local SEO is mostly used by businesses that activate in a specified location – small companies, for example.

On the other hand, national SEO is used to boost ranking on a national level. Businesses that want to attract customers from all over the country or who can provide products and services throughout the country use national SEO.

For example, a restaurant located in a touristic location might want to use national SEO to attract people. At the same time, a

manufacturing company or retailer may wish to ship products all over the country and even the world.

Off-page SEO implies backlinking, blogging, and internal linking. These are essential for any SEO strategy as they provide websites with more high-quality content that can be used by search engines to crawl.  

This type of SEO can boost your search engine rankings and increase the number of website visitors as well. You have to do it right!

What is page optimization? Well, some may think that this refers to how fast your website responds to commands and if it’s optimized appropriately for mobile.However, page optimization implies much more:

• Using new keywords with every new piece of content.

• Placing the focus keyword in the URL of a specific page.

• Placing the focus keyword in your meta description.

• Placing the focus keyword in the first paragraph of a particular article.

• Having proper keyword density.

• Having images that contain alt attributes that have the focus keyword within them.

Content SEO

This type of SEO refers to the quality of your content – and implies making it better, naturally!

Content SEO is usually considered a subset of the previous type of SEO – on-page -, and is here to help you create compelling content. As we all know, content is the true king of online, mainly due to the effects it has on page rankings and impressions, for example.

It is why you need to create content with both a dash of personal/ personality and with a vial of good on-page SEO!  

In short, you have to publish content that will be entertaining for your users, as well as for search engines – namely, the latter must be able to understand your content to promote it properly.

Stay Tuned for yet another type of SEO tomorrow…