In a commercial landscape in which 76% of consumers look at online presence before physically visiting a business, your digital presence is essential for business growth.
Prospective clients and customers are spending more time online than ever before, using search engines to find the products and services they need. To scale our businesses, we need to enhance our online visibility, and work on reeling in more traffic. But how can this be done without spending a fortune on ads? The answer is SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation is an effective and inexpensive way to create more prospective clients, and grow your business in the long-term. With 46% of Retail Customer Journeys starting with a Google Search, the e-commerce space is becoming increasingly competitive. In this climate, you cannot underestimate the value of a robust SEO strategy. We’ll take you through an explanation of how exactly SEO can help you grow, if executed correctly. Listen closely and you should pick up some top tips to increase your online visibility.
Brand Visibility and Organic Traffic
Effective SEO can be leveraged to build brand awareness. A properly implemented strategy will assist you in ranking high in the SERPs, and this increases your brand visibility. Customers will be able to identify your business because of the relevant keywords and searches you will be ranking for.
Increasing your brand visibility through SEO can subsequently increase your web traffic. This is the crucial objective of an SEO strategy, as increasing the quality and quantity of your organic traffic can lead to an increase in conversions if you’re targeting quality traffic.
When your business name is seen frequently, users will be more inclined to believe that you have the service or goods they are searching for. They’ll then be more likely to click on your website and over time this could lead to a new conversion, and cha-ching, that’s a sale on the way for you! But how can you get yourself up those ranking spots and hopefully landing in Google’s featured snippets?
The key is in the keywords. Research the right long and short-tail keywords to be implemented in your website, so that the search engine can recognise what your site is all about. Get them into your title, meta-description, and body of text. However, be careful not to keyword-cram – this will simply put a user off your product. Your content needs to use keywords but remain user-friendly and actually helpful.
Improve User Experience
SEO can also help improve the user’s experience on your site. This can potentially lead to returning customers, and an increase in time spent on the domain.
User experience refers to how easily your customers can navigate your website – it’s the product of branding and web design choices. When people search for queries related to your company, we want them to find your website and enjoy their time on it. It needs to be well-designed, easy to navigate and have a respective load speed in order to be user-friendly, and this is achieved through SEO support and auditing.
Improving a website’s usability will result in more traffic, clicks, and eventual conversions. Plus, remember to prioritise not only technical SEO, but also the website’s content. Provide relevant and high-quality content, and you’re giving the user a reason to stay on the site for longer, and have a proper look through the services you are offering.
Also, good user experience makes people more likely to link to your website. And, as we know, backlinks are an ever-important means to grow brand awareness and conversion rate.
Building Trust
SEO focuses on pushing the E-E-A-T component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This means, optimising a website to demonstrate your proven Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Trust is the most critical component of this, with Google stating that “untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.”
Therefore, a trustworthy business is going to be hitting those top spots on the SERPs. Additionally, demonstrating clear trust signals through SEO strategy is critical for business success because, when your company is credible and trusted by clients, they are more likely to buy your products or services. They will also be more likely to then recommend you to other potential customers.
Prove that you’re a trusty source in your content through including reviews, demonstrating first-hand experience, and making it easy to contact your company. This will generate more and more leads for your business. See a Guide to E-E-A-T from the SEO experts at Cedarwood for an in-depth run-down on how to hit each element of the acronym.
In Summary
SEO is a long-term marketing tactic which, when implemented effectively, will see your website continually ranking well, receiving heaps of site traffic, and consequently scoring conversions.
Looking for some help running an SEO campaign to boost your business? The SEO team here at Cedarwood Digital have a mass of experience developing tailored, results-driven strategies for companies. Contact us today to start the journey of scaling your business.