In an age where people can quickly Google anything that they like to find information, products, services, brands and even people, it’s no surprise that search engine optimization has quickly become one of the most important components of marketing a business online. Today, when users carry out a Google search or on any other search engine, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to go through all the results that come up, unless they’re looking for something very specific. Because of this, it’s important for businesses to aim to show up at the top of the results list, or at least in the very first few, to be in with a better chance of users noticing them and clicking through to explore their website.
However, with every business that has an online presence all fighting for the top spot, falling behind with SEO has become more and more frequent for businesses who perhaps aren’t quite sure how to stay up to date and keep that edge over their competition. We’ve listed some top tips and tricks to help your company stay updated and on trend when it comes to SEO techniques and strategies.
- Hire a Professional
Unless you’re running a company that offers SEO services to other businesses, there’s a high likelihood that search engine optimization isn’t your forte. And, let’s face it – when you’re running a business, there are plenty of more important things for you to think about than your search engine ranking, such as balancing the books, managing your company’s reputation, looking after your employees and much more. Because of this, it’s no surprise that companies today of all sizes choose to hire an SEO professional instead.
Professional SEO services live and breathe search engine optimization; their sole job is to make sure that your website is ranking as high as possible in search engine results. That’s why you should hire an organic SEO consultant to take care of search engine optimization instead of trying to do it yourself.
- Stay Up to Date
When it comes to SEO, one of the main things that all business owners should keep in mind is that things are constantly changing. What may have worked well for your business last year, month, or even last week could suddenly become the worst possible strategy to take.
Take guest posting, for example – once upon a time, you could quickly boost your ranking in Google’s search engine results simply by making sure that you had all the right keywords and links in a guest post, and it didn’t really matter on which website or blog it was published. Fast forward just a few years, however, and today it has become significantly more difficult for businesses to gain a ranking increase from guest posts alone.
There is a much heavier focus on the quality of the guest post and of the link; for example, it can be a bad move to create keyword heavy links and guest posts that are stuffed full of keywords, rather than providing valuable information to the reader. In addition, the website or blog on which your guest post is published has also become much more important; it must be relevant to your topic, brand and industry.
- Be Mobile-Friendly
Today, more and more people are turning to their smartphones and tablets, rather than the traditional desktop or laptop PC. Gone are the days when you needed to boot up your old dinosaur of a PC sat in the spare room to go online; today, we have access to the internet right there in our pockets. Because of this, it has become increasingly more important for business websites to be completely mobile friendly; there is nothing more frustrating when you are online than finding that the website you’re visiting can’t be easily viewed on the screen of your smartphone.
If you’ve ever tried to fill out a form, for example, using your iPhone, you’ll know exactly how tricky and irritating it can be to do this on a website that doesn’t yet support mobile devices. Not providing a mobile-friendly experience to your viewers can have disastrous results; today, internet users expect the websites that they visit to be responsive to their device, and failing to do so could result in a serious reputation drop.
Your website’s mobile-friendliness will also affect your SEO; Google is all about the user experience and will quickly penalize websites that don’t adhere to this. So, along with the potential to lose far more customers, you’ll also struggle to make it to the top ranking in search engine results.
- Avoid Common Mistakes
Often, problems with achieving the high search engine ranking that you desire for your brand can easily be rectified simply by avoiding the common mistakes that many businesses make when it comes to SEO. For example, a lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking that SEO is something that you can just do once and then forget about; however, this is not the case at all. In fact, to get the best results, search engine optimization should be ingrained in everything that you do online and be a huge part of your online presence.
In addition, many business owners fail to realize that not having an SEO plan and relying too heavily on keyword optimization will no longer get you to the top search engine ranking today. Another big mistake that many companies make is taking part in unnatural link building; links that are forcibly placed into content not only look annoying and frustrate the reader, they can harm your ranking rather than help it.
- Provide Great Content
Lastly, one of the main things that Google and other search engines are looking for when it comes to ranking websites in search results is the quality of the content that they provide. If you post overly keyword-filled, or even duplicate content to your website or blog, then you’re not going to get the results that you want. In addition, posting content that provides little or no value to the reader, or spamming them with click-bait, will also cause Google to penalize your site. Instead, provide your readers with valuable, informational blog posts and other types of content that they can put to use in their daily lives.
Did these tips help? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
