Being an entrepreneur is an unenviable position. To alter a famous saying, a successful entrepreneur is a Jack of all trades, but master of business. It takes a lot and then more to be exceptional in your field. The key is to take on the field that suits you best, however, as you cannot do everything on your own, you need to be able to select the dream team. It takes a village and the way you choose your villagers will determine whether you will run a successful business or not. This is why you need to have basic knowledge of anything that might come your way. SEO is one of those topics so keep reading to get some useful knowledge.
Select and revise keywords
Keywords are the essence of your SEO. For beginners, keywords and phrases are what people type into the search engine when looking for a certain website. Your goal is to think of as many words and phrases that should point to the website of your business. This is a process, so start writing things down and get a group of people to join you. In this case, the more the merrier since different people have different ideas and your goal is to have a large variety of words and phrases. That way you will be able to cover most of your target audience. Although you should try to get as many as you can, you also should not go too broad. The words should not be ambiguous since ambiguity will lead other business’ customers to you. This is just pure waste of money and effort. So, make sure to keep your words and phrases to the unique point that is the domain of your business.
Peak into the competition
In order to be the best one should really learn from the best. Luckily, it is not difficult to check out the competition since the results are quite public. Simply type those key words and phrases you wrote down and check out the first page of Google results. Your goal is to reach that first page. Get ready to do some extensive research. The main task you should fulfill in order to achieve this is to raise your organic traffic. Organic traffic is basically the number of clicks your website obtains from the search engine. So, make note of everything useful you can find on your competitors’ websites and consult some literature too. Perhaps the winning combination is an already known strategy combined with your authentic ideas.
Boost UI and UX
Once those clicks take your potential customers to your website, you need to make sure what they see is worth the trip. That is why UI/UX is an integral part of developing your SEO strategy. If it has been a while since you worked on your UX, now is the time to focus on that. If you have a designer, that would be a task for them, however, if you do not, try to educate yourself on the latest trends. Use the research you did for the previous point and see if you like anything UI/UX related in your notes. Your own ideas are also welcome, naturally. However, they should be under control of an expert or some good practice. Minimalistic approach is usually the one with which you cannot make a mistake. This refers to both the design and content. It is a bit more work, but you should also refactor all your content. Since you are already making changes, do it right. Go through everything and make all the necessary changes. Image and video quality are also very important, so consider using 3D rendering to keep up with the quality standards. Short texts, clear instructions and concise images and videos should be your best friends in the process.
Format content for featured snippets
Some might say this is just a tiny detail, but the devil indeed is in the details. As Google is the number one search engine when it comes to popularity, it would be smart to optimize your content according to its rules. So, when thinking about the content of your website, try to answer the top five questions your audience might ask when inquiring about your business domain. If you do this successfully, your content will appear as a featured snippet when someone from your target audience asks a relevant question. This is amazing as it drives organic traffic. Make sure to research how to do this in the best possible way and it will definitely bring results.
Choose page title and meta description wisely
These two elements are the very first things your audience sees when looking at Google results. They decide whether to click on your website based solely on these few words. This is exactly why you need to pay extra attention to designing the perfect title and description. If these are not attractive enough, there is no content in the world that will save you since nobody will be able to even see it. If you are not that good with words, hiring an external person to do this task is definitely a worthy investment. Take everything you can get because this simply needs to be good.
Use short URLs that make sense
URLs that are logically structured and simple can go a long way in making your website more user friendly. Moreover, achieving this is not difficult and almost anyone can do it. Essentially, you should try to include your key word in the URL, it should be easy to understand which means it should not be complicated. Finally, you need to be concise as some search engines have a limit and cannot read long URLs. So, if you make longer URLs you are risking being ranked lower.
Hoping that your fear of dabbling in SEO is gone and you realized it is not such a headache, especially knowing some basics. Naturally, you should hire experts to do your SEO, but an elementary understanding of the subject will make you more in control and able to keep up with the progress in your own company.
