25% of people click on the first search engine result that pops up, and many never scroll past the first page.
It pays to show up in online search results, especially if you have a business. Without landing in the top SEO rankings, your ideal customers or clients may never find you. Users of the Internet are constantly looking for relevant websites facilitated by Google when they type certain significant phrases and keywords. As a result, to reach the largest possible audience, your content must be more visible. Hiring an internet marketing agency will ensure that your website appears higher in Google search rankings. They will improve your website for search engines so that your brand is more accessible.
But there are ways you can improve your business content to show up in searches and generate more leads. Use these 10 tips to find out how.
1. Cater to Your Audience
If you have a business, you already know about the importance of identifying your target market and ideal customer. And when creating marketing content, this should be a top priority.
Know who you’re trying to sell to, and create content for them. Imagine where they are in their customer journey, what they need, and what pain points they have.
Then, brainstorm what types of topics or issues they’re looking for. This should make the bulk of your website content.
You should always be offering valuable content to your ideal customers and clients, not content that only serves to promote your business.
2. Lead With Keywords
A well-written, informative blog post or high-quality social media video might reach no one without effective keywords.
And if you’re well-versed in your industry, you may already have some ideas for keywords that people may be searching for. This is a great start, but it’s not enough.
Use keyword research tools (there are browser extensions, apps, and websites that can help) to find the exact keywords people are typing into search engines. From there, you can see which ones are most popular, as well as which might be too competitive to try.
3. Use Photos, Graphics, and Other Visuals
Your business content should use a combination of words and visuals to keep people interested and engaged. And when you use pictures, your content may show up in image search results, which can help boost traffic.
Be sure to load photos and graphics with keywords in the file name, and add a keyword-rich description when you upload.
4. Stay Current
For better SEO results, create content that is fresh and up to date. That way, search engines will recognize your webpages as being relevant for online users right now.
You can even go back to old content, editing and republishing old posts with a new date.
5. Collaborate With Others
Identify businesses or websites with a similar niche that may be willing to work with you. This can include finding websites who will interview and quote you, blogs that allow guest posts, or business listing websites that will list your website for free.
In all these situations, you have the opportunity to build solid backlinks, where a website includes a link to your website. This is essential to improving your SEO rankings and attracting more traffic.
If you struggle to find people to collaborate with, you can also try a content syndication for SEO service, where you’re matched with other websites who will publish your work and include valuable backlinks.
6. Use Internal Links
Aside from gaining links to your website from other websites, you can also boost your pages’ SEO by making your own links.
Links published on your website to your website are called internal links. And they can add to your search engine worthiness.
Let’s say you have a website for a landscaping business. You may have a blog post on eliminating yard pests, and now you’re creating new content about causes of dead grass. If one cause of dead grass is a pest infestation, you could mention this in the new post, inserting a link to the pest blog post.
Then, people will be more likely to visit the old post, and search engines will recognize its value more easily.
7. Remove Dead Links
Now you’ve heard about the importance of backlinks and internal links. But there’s another type of link you should watch out for: dead links.
In your content, you may include a combination of internal and external links. Those links may be valid and functional when you first find them, but later they may become dead links if a page is deleted or if a URL changes.
And if your content has dead links, it can ruin the SEO rankings for the entire page or post.
Check old content for dead links, and replace them when possible. There are websites available that can scan your content, searching for dead links. Routinely scan your website to ensure your links are still working.
8. Write With the Reader in Mind
When writing blog posts and other copy for your business, you should always write for the reader.
Especially online, readers nowadays want content that is easy to skim. That’s why headers and short paragraphs are essential in your writing.
It can also help to incorporate bullet points or numbered lists in your content when possible. That way, the main points can be understood at a glance, and readers are less likely to get fatigued and click away.
9. Add Metadata
If you’re new to creating SEO-friendly content, you may not be familiar with metadata. But it can’t be ignored if you’re trying to gain traffic from search engines.
Metadata is the brief information that communicates what your content is about to search engines. This includes the title, keywords, a short description, and the date.
Online users see this information, too, when they search the web. They can look to the title and description of your page or post and determine if it fits the content they’re looking for.
10. Share, Share, Share
If you want to have better SEO results, be sure to share your own content when you can.
This can include sharing a link to a recent blog post on social media, talking about it in a video, or encouraging others to visit your website in your business’s newsletter.
You can also ask others to share your content to increase visibility and traffic.
Boost Your Business Content, Boost Your Business
Creating high-quality business content is important, and it’s especially important to make sure that content gets seen by the right people.
With these 10 tips, you can boost your online content with SEO-friendly strategies. Then you can expect an increase in web traffic and more of the leads your business needs to thrive.
Learn more about digital marketing in our other business articles!