What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Advertising your business online can seem overwhelming and time-consuming. The most important thing that you need to focus on is to build an online presence.
Your online presence is the sum of all the identities you create to keep your business relevant. It includes everything from customer interaction, online participation and social identity. With a broader online presence, your business will improve organic traffic, increase brand awareness, improve fan following and enhance your leads.
Search Engine Optimization is the backbone of your online presence. Once you have a website, your aim is to be found by search engines so they can list your website in their search results where potential customers are searching for your products and or services. Because search engine optimization can boost your company’s online presence, global popularity and click-through-rate, small businesses can see a significant change in their business outlook and growth when they invest in search engine optimization efforts.
What Do Search Engines Want?
Search engines perform the basic job by referring users to a website that they are looking for. When a user searches something using a keyword or phrase, the search engines list all those relevant websites showing a back-link and sponsored link to the search keyword. To determine the relevancy of the keyword, search engines depend on important factors, some of which are listed below:
Unique Content:
Search engines highlight contents that have relevant keyword, titles, phrases and descriptions. In short, they depend on quality content to determine the relevancy of the searched keyword.
Speed and Performance:
Search engines will never list your website on the first page if your website is slow. A website’s performance is important too.
Strong Links:
If your website has enough content to link and accurate reference sites to good websites, then search engines are going to rank it high.
User-friendly:
The layout, look and landing page of your website matter. If your website has a clutter-free layout, a smart design and has a low bounce rate, search engines will rank your website well.
Helpful SEO Strategies
Build Local Citations:
Adding your business to local directories can benefit you immensely but at the same time can be time-consuming. This process is straightforward and easy to accomplish. If you wish for your website design to boost in local search rankings, then this is a great local SEO strategy you can use for your business.
Here is a list of our Top Canadian Business Directories:
Complete a NAP Audit:
NAP stands for Business Name, Address, and Phone Number. By having this information consistently listed in important directories such as Yelp will help boost your rank. If you have an inconsistent or incorrect NAP it could hurt your ranking.
Get Listed on Google Maps:
This is an obvious one that any local marketing firm will tell you. You must create a Google “My Business” for each location for your business. This is completely free to do for anyone and will appear right next to other relevant search results.
Another important local SEO strategy to help with your business marketing is to create local landing pages that target local keyword searches.
Get Reviews:
Search engines favour companies who have more reviews. In fact, close to 90% of consumers have read a review to determine the quality of a local business.
No matter what kind of business you run, you always want to more people find your business. Implementing a good SEO strategy is one of the most effective digital marketing methods you can use to start you off on the right foot.
Optimize Images for SEO
An overlooked part of SEO is image filenames. When you import an image from a camera, it will have a generic filename like DSC_0007.jpg. and is not going to help describe the photo or earn points for SEO. Instead of leaving these undescriptive filenames, give the file a name that better describes it for indexing by Google.
Build Backlinks
Backlinks are inbound links to your website from another place on the internet. They are useful to search engines like Google because they give an indication if a website is reputable. Another website adding a link to you is essentially a vote for your website, as it shows their customers that they think your site is worth visiting.
A good backlink will have some of the following attributes:
- Come from another reputable source
- Be included on a page with relevant or related information
- The anchor text will be a relevant keyword
- Your own website will be of good quality
