The proliferation of e-commerce, m-commerce, and social marketplaces has taken the corporate industry by storm. In today’s highly-saturated and competitive business world, it’s getting increasingly challenging to create a sound online presence, create new customers, and promote their brand identity.

According to the latest statistics, over 252,000 new websites are created each day, out of which most of the websites belong to businesses. As more competitors are jumping onto the online bandwagon, businesses find it difficult to maintain their top slots on search engine result pages (SERPs) in the race to increase visibility to potential customers.

To survive and grow amid the fierce competition, businesses must adopt effective digital marketing and website optimization strategies and increase their visibility across a variety of online platforms. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. Continue reading to discover what SEO is and how it helps you create and retain customers, increase visibility across platforms, and grow your business in the long term.

Without further ado, let us get straight to the topic.

What is SEO and Why it is Important?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is essentially a set of best practices for optimizing websites and digital marketing campaigns. These best practices help you increase your website ranking in search results on popular search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., as well as on a variety of social media platforms.

Each time a visitor searches for a specific phrase, also known as a keyword, the search engine uses a specialized search algorithm to find the most relevant results and displays these results on the search engine result page. This includes the top 10 related search results in links to websites on the first page, while the other results follow on subsequent pages. Research shows that 55% of users click the first search result while 39% click the top 10 results, which leaves only 6% navigating to the next pages.

To increase your organic click-through rates (CTR), you must reach the top 10 search results in all search engines and, ideally, make your way through the top 3 search results. When your website is optimized for search engines, it becomes more visible to potential customers and increases its chances of attracting more organic traffic. SEO-optimized websites are also more user-friendly and include valuable content relevant to a user’s search intent, which automatically translates into better website credibility, more conversions, and improved revenues.

Effective SEO Techniques to Grow Your Business

SEO may seem a complex terminology but its implementation is fairly easier. Here are the 3 best and most useful SEO techniques to increase your website’s visibility and consequently grow your business:

1. SEO Optimization for Local Searches

Whenever a potential customer enters a search query to find a specific product or service, popular search engines like Google and Bing prefer searching for local businesses located near the customer’s geographic location. This is why creating local business profiles on maps and optimizing your business profile for local searches is extremely valuable for creating new customers and growing your business.

Google allows businesses to create Google My Business Profiles that include basic contact information, geotagging, link to websites, and your business’s basic information. This is where SEO can work wonders for your business. You can optimize your Google My Business profile using targeted keywords to rank higher in local searches and increase your visibility in search results.

2. Choose the Right Keywords for Your Website and Content

To increase your visibility in search engines, you need to identify target keywords and incorporate them strategically in your content throughout your website. These keywords should revolve around the user’s search intent and your website’s key contents, products, and services. For this purpose, you must research both your primary and secondary keywords that resonate with your website and develop rich content around these keywords.

The best way to research your keywords is to go through your competitor websites, particularly those that have already established a strong brand, and analyze their content in detail. This will give you an idea of the primary and secondary keywords you should focus on. However, it’s important to consider the following factors when choosing keywords:

• Focus on the user’s search intent.
• Base your keyword research around data and not your intuition.
• Use powerful keyword research tools to skim off the best keywords for your content.
• Prefer using long-tail keywords to improve your visibility in search results.
• Don’t rely on a single primary keyword. Incorporate LSI secondary keywords more frequently within the content.
• Choose keywords with high search volume as well as mid-volume keywords that match the user’s search intent.
• Make sure the keywords you choose have lower competition.
• Avoid using awkward phrasing within your content only to push the exact match keywords.

3. Opt for Both On-Page and Off-Page Optimization

On-page optimization means using primary and secondary keywords within your website’s pages to improve its visibility and relevance to search engines. On-page optimization includes page elements like meta descriptions, page titles, headings and subheadings in your content, page headers, content in paragraphs, image names, Alttexts, URLs, and video subtitles. When optimizing your website pages, make sure to keep the content relevant, high-quality, and valuable for your audience.

Both on-page and off-page optimization are equally important to improve the visibility of your website in search results and increase the credibility of your content. Off-page optimization refers to all the activities you do outside of your website to increase its credibility and domain authority. You can do this by creating content on high-quality and authoritative websites with backlinks to your website’s pages. Off-page optimization strategy includes creating guest posts, reaching out to influencers, participating in various online forums, and engaging in social media marketing.

Final Thoughts

As more websites continue to saturate the online space, it has become essential for businesses to adopt SEO practices to maintain top search rankings. Using the SEO techniques discussed in this article, you can attract more organic web traffic to your websites, increase your brand’s visibility and authority, and generate more leads and sales. However, it’s important to continuously improve your SEO strategy to stay abreast with search algorithm updates and gain an edge over your competition.