Virtually every business has a website in 2020, but how many of those actually bring in visitors and create leads? The answer is, there are many websites out there that get next to no visits.
That’s because you can’t just put a website up and wait for people to come; you’ve got to put some hard work in. However, when you follow the right path, your hard work can pay off in the form of hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.
So, what areas of your SEO should you be focusing on?
Content
All of the SEO optimizations in the world isn’t going to help you if your content isn’t up to scratch. Google needs to send people to high-quality content that answers their questions, and if your pages can’t do that, then they’re simply not going to rank well.
Search engines look at how users interact with your page to give them a better idea of where it should rank, and one of the best signs is that people are spending plenty of time reading your content. The only way to achieve this is by having high-quality content that gives value to readers. Whether that’s through video, text, or images, it needs to be engaging and accurate.
Links
It’s very difficult to rank well for competitive keywords if you don’t have quality backlinks pointing to your site.
You might be producing some very engaging content, but Google needs to know that the information contained in the page is likely to be authoritative and accurate. One of the ways it verifies this is by looking at your backlinks.
If your website has lots of links from authoritative sites in the same niche, then this signals to Google that your content is more trustworthy. Say you’re writing about cell phones, and Google sees that Apple, Samsung, and Nokia have all linked to your site, then they’re going to see this as a good sign that you know what you’re talking about.
Keywords
Finding the right keywords is about finding words that people search for, but also ones where you have a realistic chance of ranking. If we go back to “digital marketing,” there’s nothing stopping you from going for this keyword, but you’re going to have to go up against some incredibly stiff competition.
If you can find longtail keywords, which may have less search volume, you can give yourself a much better chance of ranking well. Ranking first for a keyword that gets 100 searches in a month is going to get you further than never ranking for a keyword that gets a million searches.
Keywords might not be the most important part of your page, but they’re important none the less, and choosing the right keywords to go after will significantly improve your chances of ranking well.
Local SEO
Just as it’s important to go after the keywords where you have a better chance of ranking, it’s also important to target the people that are actually going to become a customer. If you’re a local brick and mortar business, then going after global keywords isn’t going to do that.
Instead, you might be much better off focusing on your local SEO, and making sure you appear in the local search results. Appearing in local search means you’re reaching people with high intent of visiting your business. For example, if you’re a local butcher, and you show up at the top of the rankings for “local butchers,” there’s a great chance the person searching is going to follow through and make a purchase from you.
The other good thing is that when you’re focusing on local SEO, you’re not competing with massive global companies with huge marketing budgets to throw at their SEO.
Consistency
SEO doesn’t work overnight; you’ve got to be consistent with your efforts. Sometimes it takes a little patience before you see the fruits of your labor, so make sure you keep at it. Sometimes, people can give up right before their hard work starts to pay off and this is a shame.
If you create good content and focus on the basics of SEO, then you’ve got a good chance of attracting visitors, but you’ve got to be consistent with it. With time and hard work, you can greatly increase the number of visitors to your website and get higher quality leads.
If you’re going to have a website, then you might as well get it working for you, and good SEO is a great way of doing this.
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