You got your business website up and running! Great! Congratulations!
The design is great, it is connected with your social media platforms, and everything is responding, now what?
It feels like opening your store at the far end of a city and not knowing how to attract customers.
To be found by your customers you need to be ranked by search engines for your niche related keywords. The higher you rank on the first page, the more chances of attracting potential customers you have. In most cases, nobody bothers about the second page of search engine result page (SERP).
Most startups are eager to make their first sales and for them, Pay Per Click (PPC) or paid advertisement seems a great opportunity to start earning quickly. Staying on top with the help of paid advertisements is also an option, but that can get very expensive very quickly. It can fit into your budget for a short while but you will only get sales as long as you are pumping a giant load of hard-earned cash into the advertisements.
Even if you are already a well-established brand who gets most sales through word of mouth, you can increase your reach to a bigger target population by ranking for keywords with higher search volume. This could be your chance of tapping the untapped market.
Search engines are using artificial intelligence to sort out helpful content on the internet from spamming websites. Search engines have set up certain rules and attached weight to each rule for calculating the quality and relevance of the content available online. It is important to learn about these metrics and algorithms and to invest time and effort in applying this knowledge to work for the benefit of your business.
To rank among the top few websites on the first page organically, you need to convince the search engine that you have the most relevant, most informative pages on your user-friendly website. That’s where the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engines aim to provide the most helpful and most relevant information for the users. Thus they set algorithms that will help them evaluate which pages the users will be most interested in based on the words they type in the search engines. The words or phrases typed in a search engine when looking for a piece of information are called keywords or search phrases.
Search engine optimization is the systematic implementation of strategies that help your website rank higher on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) so you can reach to the maximum number of your targeted audience and outrank your competitors. It is a set of strategies to have organic reach towards your audience.
Search engine optimization is a set of ever-changing techniques to optimize your website according to ever-changing ranking algorithms of search engines.
Did you know that the most popular search engine Google make minor algorithm changes every day and major algorithm changes every few months?
A decade ago SEO was as simple as putting in the keyword on the back end and front end of the website as many time as possible, and there was no such thing as too many times. The more you stuff in the keywords, the better chances you had for ranking higher on Google. This manipulation termed as keyword stuffing was greatly unfair and now is penalised by Google. People often try to cheat their way to the top, and thus search engines need to change algorithms to keep things fair, so they will only rank the websites which will be actually helpful for their users.
As Search engines are getting smarter the SEO is getting more complicated and tougher. Previously what was considered an easy hack to get ranked quickly now can get your website penalized. Keyword stuffing is one such outdated strategy. With search engines setting more sophisticated algorithms for ranking and constantly updating them SEO has to evolve accordingly and SEO experts need to keep up with the latest trends.
SEO experts have to constantly stay up-to-date about algorithms and upgrade their techniques and skillsets, so they can help their clients do better and beat the competition in the online market. There is as much work on the back end of the website as much visible on the front end of your website. Similarly, there is some off-page activity required such as backlink generation.
Backlinks are actually other websites giving your website a credit or recommendation, which not only brings in traffic but also adds to the page authority and domain authority of your page (both of these are important Google algorithms).
Keyword Analysis
SEO experts use tools to assess the most valuable keywords in your niche and assess them for their search volume, click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate and competition. On the basis of their years of experience, they are able to recommend you the most suitable keywords to target for generating business.
There are free tools available online but obviously they are not as good and helpful as the paid tools. Professionals always use paid tools so they can offer the best results to their clients.
Content is the King – Content Marketing.
SEO requires quality “plagiarism-free” content on your website. Nothing can beat an original, helpful and good quality content. If you are able to create content that is of value to your target audience, they will spend time on your website to read it, this gives a positive signal to search engines. The search engines rank the pages higher if users are spending more time on it because they are probably very helpful or interesting for the visitors.
Organic Traffic
The best thing is that SEO is helping you get traffic organically. Organic is more healthy and once you start ranking for the targeted keyword, you stay there for a very long time. A higher ranking will bring more credibility towards your business and thus more sales. The results are promising and long-lasting with a better return on investment.
More opportunities
Better Targetting – As taking your business online helps you to target a larger population, SEO helps you to target your population more precisely. Targeting the audience which is more willing to spend on the product you are selling will help you make more sales. With the help of the right keywords, your website will be found by the clients who have their money in hand. Seo experts have tools which can help them study demographics of people visiting or leaving your website which can help them further fine-tune their strategies. Tools provide valuable insight towards user behaviour and help understand which category of users are more likely to convert into customers.
Reduced Bounce Rate – SEO even reduces otherwise lost chances referred to as bounce rate. Bounce rate is the ratio of the audience which visited your page but left within a few seconds either because took too long to load, or they didn’t find what they were looking for in the first glance or they simply got distracted. By making your website more user-friendly SEO helps improve the loading time of the page, create catchy and interesting content that will anchor the attention of visitors. A bigger bounce rate negatively impacts your ranking and chances of making a sale.
More Browsing -Internal linking helps your visitors navigate through your website, as more time a person spends on a website more likely they are to spend their money. In fact, more time a client spends browsing through on a website, more they spend on its products.
More Sales!
Our team of SEO experts can perform an audit for your website and offer you the best performing keywords for marketing your products online. On-Page SEO is the best way to rank organically on search engines.
We can help draw a sophisticated online marketing plan for your business after performing audits using tools available for SEO professionals. If you chose to hire our team of SEO experts we will work on your On-page SEO and Off-Page SEO, report monthly progress and recommend the right digital marketing strategy for your online business to grow. We have helped several small businesses in Malaysia to achieve their goals and we wish to help you get ranked too.
