From Leads to Sales: A Comprehensive Approach to Lead Generation
May 16, 2024
Dec 18, 2023
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and in simple terms, SEO means making your website as visible as possible for people using search engines.
The ultimate goal of doing SEO is to get more qualified potential leads or customers onto your website, which can directly lead to. a huge impact on revenue coming back to your business.
SEO can be a wonderful marketing channel for a number of businesses. It works for small companies all the way up to huge publicly traded companies. So if you think people are actively researching a problem that your company can solve and actively looking for a product that you sell, SEO can be a great fit to ultimately make it easier for them to find your business. When they’re searching for that information online.
To learn more about SEO: How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Helps Your Business Generate More Traffic and Value
SEO works in a number of different ways.
Ultimately, the job of SEO experts is to make your site as visible as possible in search engines by making sure that search engines can crawl and understand what your site is about and know exactly what each page on your site is about. Another important facet of that is making sure that users are having a wonderful experience as they visit your site. So these two aspects, both optimizing for search engines and optimizing for users, come together and form SEO.
Here are a few examples of things that we might recommend on a site. It could be adding additional content to the site to add some context and further detail on exactly what a particular page is about. It could be adjusting how texts live on your site, how images are added to your site, and making sure, from a technical standpoint, all of that content and information on your site is accessible by search engines. In a nutshell, we use various tactics to make sure that search engines and people understand everything about your products or services on each page of your site. The easier it is to communicate those things to search engines like Google and to users, the better your site can perform in search engines, which means more and more traffic coming back to your site.
There are many different unique aspects and types of things that we want to look at ultimately when it comes to SEO.
For instance, technical SEO is looking at a website from a server level, really digging into the code and the performance of both the code and the server. Are you making sure that the information on the site is presented in a way that users are able to access it from multiple devices? Is the code loading on the side in a faster manner, or does it take the site 30 seconds to load a simple page of information? All those things are very important from a technical standpoint for us to analyze. On the other end, there are also On-Page SEO factors that indicate what type of information you are conveying through the content on the site. Do you have enough content on the site for both users and search engines?
There are also a couple of other areas out there, like Off-page SEO, which analyzes and looks at how people talk about you and your brand outside of your site. Are there lots of high-quality websites linking back to yours? Are people discussing your brand on social media? What is your reputation online? So within this big SEO bubble, there are lots of smaller bubbles of really important things that we want to look at and address when it comes to your website.
Set up a well-structured website using information architecture: Create a comprehensive library of resources catering to individuals interested in your products or services. Structuring this content in a way that aligns with both search engines and user preferences can prove to be a powerful strategy. For instance, if your site includes a section offering valuable insights on using a specific product, merely posting that information is beneficial for users.
However, to maximize impact in terms of usability, SEO, and traffic generation, a thoughtful approach is essential.
Develop a map outlining the optimal way to present information on your website. Provide it with a logical structure, categorize content, and determine the specific pages within each category. This approach not only facilitates easy navigation for users but also ensures a coherent structure that helps search engines comprehend the categories and types of information you aim to convey. By creating a well-organized resource guide, you can outshine competitors and establish a strong online presence.
Once a crawler finds a site, it gets added to a giant database called an index. This is basically how Google and other search engines can pull up search results when someone types in a query. Search engines don’t always find websites automatically. If someone links to your website from theirs, then a crawler can find it when crawling the original site. But in a lot of cases, you have to submit your site to search engines. If your site is not in any search engines there’s really no point in doing all of these SEO tasks. To figure out if your site has been indexed by Google, search “site” and then your site’s address. If you don’t see any results, that means your site is not being crawled and indexed.
Start by hooking up your site to Google Search Console. Just create an account if you don’t have one and follow the directions to link your site. Search console will tell you if (and when) Google has crawled your site, any crawl errors, external links pointing to your site, and more. For Google to index the pages on your site you will want to create an XML sitemap and submit it in Search Console. Another powerful tool you should connect to is Google Analytics. This is where you will track all of your SEO efforts. You can see how long people are staying on your pages, which pages get the most organic traffic and so much more.
Keywords are basically the backbone of any SEO content strategy. When you create content, you will want to create it with one main keyword and a few related keywords in mind. So if you run a doctor’s office and you want to write about the cost of a certain procedure, you should research that topic to see if people are actually searching for it, what keywords people use when searching, and how hard it is to rank in search engines. Tools like SEMrush can help you shape your keyword strategy.
Never forget about the competition. Google is like the wild, wild west. There’s not enough room for all of us on the first page. If you use keyword tools to pick your target keyword, your job is only half done. Search for your target keyword and take a look at the top results. Which keywords are the top-ranking results targeting? Look at the format of the content, which topics they cover, and any other elements they use. This should help inform your strategy when you start writing.
Internal linking is an SEO best practice that helps crawlers and people find pages on your website. It also helps create a hierarchy of information that makes site navigation a lot easier. A great place to start is your homepage. If you don’t have a navigation menu, you really should create one. Here, you can include links to other major pages, your blog,an “About Us’ page. What you do really depends on what you need. Take a moment to map out your site. And when you create new content, it’s a good SEO task to link your new content in any older piece of content. Just keep in mind that you want to include links only where they are relevant. Linking to a page about brushing your teeth on a page about yoga doesn't make sense. So avoid any bad pairings.
Backlinks are the backbone of off-page SEO. Sort of like how keywords are the backbone of on-page SEO. When other authoritative websites link to yours, they pass on some of their site’s value to your site. This helps build trust and credibility between you and search engines, boosting your position in the search engines results pages (also known as SERPs). It’s important to have an idea of where your backlinks are coming from and there are plenty of tools out there to help. You can start with free tools like the Ahrefs backlink checker. Even Google Search Console can help inform your backlink profile. An advantage of Search Console is you can view any crawl errors on your site. If you see any errors, you will definitely want to fix them or redirect broken links to pages that work. Nothing ruins user experience like landing on an error page.
Similar to the keyword research strategy, analyzing your competitors can help give you an advantage when it comes to earning links for your site. You can still use the tools mentioned before (Minus Google Search Console) to dive into the backlinks pointing to your competitors' sites. If a website or blog links to your competitors’ content, they would probably be willing to link to yours as well.
An XML sitemap is a document that contains all of the URLs you want in the search results. You can easily create one with a sitemap tool or a plugin if you are using WordPress. Once you have a sitemap, you should submit it to Google Search Console. After you have done that, give Google some time to crawl your website. You can use the Sitemap report in Search Console to see when your site was crawled and how many URLs were found.
Robots.txt is almost like an anti-sitemap. It’s a document that tells search engines what not to crawl on your site. It might sound counterintuitive to block certain pages of your site from search engines, but it’s really helpful in certain situations. Maybe you have a very targeted PDF on your site you don’t want to be discovered by Google. Maybe you have a thank you page after someone makes a purchase. Not everything on your site should be easily accessed by the public. However, be careful you are not accidently blocking crawlers from pages you do want in the search search results. When creating a robots.txt file, the term user-agent you see is the crawler. Disallow followed by the subfolders on your site, is what you want to block. An asterisk next to the user-agent represents all crawlers, so use that wisely.
A slow website creates a poor user experience and not all pages have the same speed. Just because your homepage loads quickly doesn't mean blog posts A, B, and C do, too. You can plug any of your pages into Google’s page speed insights tool and get a score, plus a bunch of helpful suggestions for how to make things faster. The easiest fix is to compress any multimedia content on your pages, like photos or infographics. Avoid uploading videos directly to your site too. Host them on platforms like Youtube.
Lastly, site secure is taken into account for your rankings. Sites with URLS that begin with HTTP are secure. Secure websites protect information entered into the site, like emails, passwords, addresses, or any personal information. This makes it harder for hackers to steal your personal data. To secure your website, you need to purchase and install an SSL certificate.
That concludes this basic SEO checklist. There’s really a lot more to it, we encourage you to visit our website, blog post and get more of the SEO details. If you complete any of these SEO tasks for your website, you are off to a great start. However, don’t be impatient. You might not see the effects of your SEO for a few months.
If you are looking to harness the power of SEO for your business, check out our SEO services today. We can help you develop and deploy SEO solutions that will transform your business and give you a competitive edge.
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