Business owners have often heard of SEO. For many though, they’re not sure of what an SEO strategy is. For others, they know what it is but get overwhelmed by the process. An effective SEO strategy is an essential process that’s designed to get you in front of the right audience for your business. It also ensures all elements of SEO are covered within that.
"These include the technical ‘behind-the-scenes’ aspects, as well as practical things you can implement on a consistent basis."
Technical aspects of SEO
When it comes to the technical side, this is what most business owners think of, when you mention SEO.
The technical elements of your site can quickly be resolved, with the right help. For some, that help will comprise of your website maintenance guy. For others, it will consist of WordPress plugins.
Important technical SEO considerations are:
- A fast loading website
- Being mobile friendly
- Website security
- Indexing and crawl friendly
These are massively important aspects of your SEO, so it’s no wonder most business get overwhelmed by SEO. However, with the right help, these are quickly resolved.
Practical aspects of an SEO strategy
Working out the practical aspects of your SEO doesn’t have to be difficult. In its simplest form, it boils down to three things – what do you want to be known for, what does that mean, and how does that break down into specific words and phrases?
For example, you’re a coach who focuses on helping other business owners. What you want to be known for is helping other businesses to grow their business and get clients. What does that mean? It means you help them solve problems and questions they have around – getting customers, knowing what to charge, how to manage their time etc. The words and phrases your ideal clients are typing into search engines to find answers to those problems and questions, become the specific word and phrases that form the basis of your SEO strategy – they’re what you want them to use, in order to find you.
Links
Authority is key, when it comes to links. Not only do you want sites of value linking to you, you also want to link out to those sites too. However, you need to ensure these sites are from sites that are both relevant and of value – as this is the key to a successful link strategy.
Linking is about connecting interesting content to other relevant content. It’s about making connections that will enhance the content you’re liking from – and it’s about doing so in a natural way. This means guest blogging with a link back to your site. It’s about giving people further resources to explore and linking to other sites that offer similar or additional value.
Content
You cannot link anything of value, if you don’t have content. As mentioned above, that content needs to be relevant, but it also needs to be engaging and of high-quality. If you’re unsure of what constitutes great content, it’s content that’s relevant to your target audience.
This leads us to the SEO side of content. Whenever you create a piece of content, you’ll be naturally utilising SEO, in the form of:
- Keywords
- Titles
- Meta descriptions
- Descriptive URLs
- Content optimisation
There is no need to resort to underhand keyword stuffing, badly-written content, if you focus on creating what your ideal customer wants!
A mixture of paid and organic
Finally, an effective SEO strategy will have a mixture of both paid and organic SEO elements within it.
Organic SEO strategies are those things that happen naturally, because of what you’re already doing – such as an interesting article you’ve created and shared, encourages additional visitors to visit your site. It’s those things that take time to build, but provide long-lasting results.
Paid SEO is when you implement strategies such as Pay Per Click advertising and search engine marketing and other strategies, to get you faster, short-lived results. Whether you want to be on the front page of Google for a certain keyword, get your advert in front of targeted people or increase your website visitors, you’re creating and funding a campaign to get you those end results.
As you can see, if you want your SEO strategy to be an effective one, it needs to be well thought out, cover both the short and long term, and combine a variety of different elements. However, if it’s done well, it will pay dividends to your business – both now and further down the line.
For many business owners, SEO is a phrase that fills them with overwhelm and dread but, as you can see, that doesn’t have to be the case. By taking the time to understand what makes an effective SEO strategy, you’ll see it’s something that can be easily implemented – both on your own and with the right experts on your team!