When making a sale, your customers need to know who you are. Nobody buys your product or service when they can’t find you. And in today’s world, this means visibility. Your customers need to find you online. Sure, it’s worthwhile to have a physical storefront. But—especially in the post-COVID world—most of our interactions are taking place online. This goes for business transactions as well.
Of course, we all know the key to being found in the physical world: location, location, location. And the same goes for the online world. But before your customers can find you online, a search engine needs to find you first.
Being found by a search engine isn’t as difficult as a customer stumbling upon your storefront at random. There are tools for optimizing your website’s visibility. These tools can make sure you get to the top of your products’ search results. Today, we’re going to discuss three simple ways to make this happen.
Secrets to Successful SEO
The rules for what constitutes successful SEO are constantly changing. Unfortunately, most of the major search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) don’t directly reveal what their algorithms are looking for. There are a few best practices most of us can rely on.
First things first, use title tags and meta descriptions for every page on your site. These can help get your pages ranked higher in search engines. And they can increase click-through rates from your potential customers. To increase your visibility through these means, you might want to use tools to make sure each page on your site is optimized. You can start with a web-based tool like Siteliner.
You’ll also want to rid your site of 404 errors. These errors can lead to problems with Google indexing. But you can fix this with a simple 301 redirect. When you’re interested in scanning for these kinds of errors, take a look at Google Search Console. You’ll want to look under “crawl errors.” A number of plugins exist to either redirect or make fun of 404 error notices.
Finally, you want to make your content easily shareable. This doesn’t affect your site’s ranking directly. But a site’s inbound links have been confirmed as one of the top tools Google uses in its algorithm.
Using the Right Keywords
Of course, the oldest (and most necessary) way to optimize SEO is by using keywords. But you want to make sure you use the “right” keywords. This requires research.
You’ll want to know:
- Which keywords consumers are searching for when finding sites like yours,
- What the search volume is for each keyword,
- And the difficulty of being ranked for each keyword.
When you know the answers to each of these three questions, you can choose the best keywords for your site. You can start with a dedicated keyword research tool like Semrush. This will help answer your questions and set you on the right path.
Optimizing for Mobile
Optimizing for mobile is key to improving your search results. Particularly, you want to make sure your site loads quickly on mobile devices. You can do this in three ways.
First, you want to make sure you don’t use too many HTTPS requests on your site. To do this, you need to keep scripts to a minimum. This means you want to minimize the number of images you use. This means only using images when they help your copy. Sure, a picture may be worth a thousand words. But a thousand words takes a long time to load on a mobile device.
This means you want to keep your image files as small as possible. Of course, there are sites designed to help you do just this. Tinypng is one of these sites. It can help you compress PNG and JPEG files.
Finally, make sure to use a fast host site. This requires a bit of research. But it’s worth it when it comes to getting your search results to the top of the page.
Of course, services exist to help you optimize your site for marketing purposes. And here at StellaPop, we always do our best to help your business reach its potential. Our marketing services are designed to assist small businesses with their brand strategy. Let’s talk!
See Also:
Authentic is Right So Write for Humans, Not SEO
Building a Better Homepage, “Like Woah”
8 Ways to Boost Your Visibility and Discoverability for Any Size Business