When it comes to owning a business, one of the main pillars of your focus will be directed towards business growth. In the past, a lot of time and effort would have needed to be put into this part of the business physically, through business exposure, talking to potential clients, and networking.
(Photo : Tyler Franta – Unsplash)
While these options are still viable, where online usage is at an all-time high, business owners everywhere need to realise the potential that lies within online growth opportunities. There are many different ways in which you can accomplish this. For example, you can research market trends, formulate strong business plans, use social media platforms, use a marketing team, and incorporate the help of various tools such as search engine optimisation (SEO). So, if you are looking to grow and take your business up a notch, then an important practice to learn about would be SEO.
SEO, as it suggests in the name, is a way of optimising for search engines such as Google so as to help increase the visibility of your website or online business platform. The better visibility that your online business has, the higher potential you have at gaining organic traffic, and sales through new customers and clients finding you, and hopefully returning.
SEO is a great way to gain new, organic customers, and clients. If you don’t use SEO for your business, it could be that your website is ranked on page 100+ when it comes to a Google search. However, if you spend a little time optimizing your online business pages, it could be that over time you can push your business into the first ten pages of a Google search, or even to the first suggested place to visit. As you can see, this would be a huge benefit to any business looking to grow.
Search engines are one of the most used tools when it comes to consumers looking for goods and services to buy. For that reason, it is incredibly important that you as a business owner, take advantage of this opportunity to gain additional, organic sales.
If you are looking for ways in which you can use SEO to help grow your business, then here are several steps to consider, or implement into your business plan.
Make sure your platform is set up to allow on-page optimization:
When trying to grow your business with SEO tactics, not only do you need to know what tactics to deploy – but you also need to ensure that you have the right systems and tools in place to do so. There are a variety of ways in which you can ensure that SEO is enabled on your website.
For example, you should always make sure that you have a content management system (CMS), such as HubSpot that has integrated SEO tools. Platforms such as HubSpot are a great way to help your business grow with SEO, amongst a variety of other business tasks, such as customer service. SEO requires a website with good speed, optimized meta titles and descriptions, and much more. A CMS system such as HubSpot, will provide you with all of this, and more. A HubSpot agency will be able to help you.
Find the right keywords to use
When it comes to SEO, a lot of the process revolves around finding out and optimizing your online business platform around the kind of keywords that people are searching for. These keywords will then help you to create, and provide relevant content that your potential customers or clients are searching for. This in turn will get your platform more clicks, and as a result, drive more organic traffic to you.
Create high-quality content
Like with almost anything in life, if you want people to consume your products, services, or information, then you will want to create it to the highest quality possible. Not only will creating high-quality content attract more people, but it will also have a greater chance of converting them into a customer or even a loyal supporter of your business.
Through high-quality content, you will show that you have your customers and clients as a high priority, and you will show goodwill, by building the foundations of trust. If you compare a company that creates, and puts out high-quality content, to one that publishes anything, then you will easily be able to decide which company you would want to invest in and do business with. Not only should you write high-quality content for your potential customers to read, but also for Google.
Google will crawl, and analyze your content, and has the ability to determine what is high-quality, versus what is a pile of rubbish. This can greatly affect where Google places your website in the rankings. So, if you want to have a better chance at ranking on the first few pages, ensure that you create high-quality content.
Make sure your website is fast
Making sure that your website is fast will not only benefit those who use the website and their experience, but it will also help improve the SEO of your website too. If you have too many images, or videos scattered throughout your website, this can negatively impact the performance of each page. Although visuals are a great way of showing, or communicating information to your potential customers, and clients, it also uses a lot of data and puts stress on the website. Instead, you should find a balance and create web pages that have relevant and clear information, with limited images or videos. Speed is something that Google considers.
Ensure your website is user and mobile friendly
The functionality of your website, or online business platform will be a large factor when it comes to helping your business grow. By optimising your site so that people all over the world, and through multiple devices can easily access and use your website is a great way to help boost your growth opportunities through SEO.
If you picture visiting a website where the information about the business is unclear or trying to buy their product or service is a long and tedious process, or even if you are trying to simply contact them and struggle to find their details, you are very unlikely to spend long on their website, and likely will find someone else. Whereas if you visit a website that has everything laid out for you to easily find or purchase, the chances of becoming a customer are much higher.
If you have a website that is not very user-friendly, this can also impact your rankings due to Google recognising that people are abandoning your site, rather than interacting with it. Google may also not be able to determine its relevance, and therefore, your rankings may be impacted.
Track and measure your efforts
When it comes to growing a business or improving at most things in life in general, something that you can implement to help is to track and measure your efforts. By recording, and analyzing what has happened, what works, and what could do with improvements, you will highlight and find new and improved ways of how you operate as a business.
There are of course many other aspects of your business that you are likely involved heavily in. So, if taking on another task such as learning about SEO and how you can use it to help grow your business is not something that is feasible for you, then fear not. You can simply employ the services of an SEO company to aid you in your journey. However, if you or a member of your team has an interest in or knowledge regarding SEO, why not try implementing some of these top tips?
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