You know the joke, “The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google’s search results”? Well, it’s true. Unless you’re a desperate college student looking for an obscure source for your report, you’re probably sticking to the first page of the SERPs for most of your queries. And so are your customers. If your business is struggling to rank and get in front of the eyes of your potential customers, it may be time to rethink your SEO strategy.
If you get your business to the first page of Google, not only will you be able to start landing easy sales, you’ll dramatically increase the overall value and equity of your company. But SEO can be a costly, time-consuming, and difficult process to get right. But it’s something every business needs to do to succeed in 2021 and beyond. We’ve put together five tips that will help you and your business rise to the top of that coveted first page of Google.
Update Your Keyword List
You can follow your gut for a lot of things in life—but not when it comes to SEO. Your decisions should be informed by hard data, such as research into what terms your potential customers are actually searching for. Online tools like Ahrefs or Moz can help you generate a list of keywords that will help you discover what your customers are (and aren’t) searching for. Once you have an updated and accurate list of keywords you should target, you can tailor your ads, landing pages, emails, and other copy to include those terms, which lets Google know to show that content to your potential customers.
If you’re unsure about how to properly do keyword research, reaching out to a marketer or SEO expert for their advice and guidance can help you get started. Since getting the proper keyword to target is the backbone of your SEO strategy, you want to make sure you’re doing it right. Even if you don’t have the budget for a full SEO team to do long-term service on your site, many SEO agencies and SEO freelancers are willing to do a bit of high-level keyword research and analysis for your company. They want to develop a relationship with you for possible future work, and you need a little advice until you’re in a financial position to employ their services—at this point in your business, it’s a strategy where everybody wins!
Don’t Ignore Your Blog
Long-form articles on your blog is a must-do SEO strategy in 2021. Not only does high-quality blog posts show you’re a serious competitor and thought leader in your industry, it also helps search engines understand your website better and show it to more potential customers. The content on your website’s blog needs to be relevant to your industry and helpful to your customers. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think (and research) the types of questions people in your target audience are asking. These are great opportunities for blog content.
If you have an article that used to be high up in the rankings, but isn’t performing as well recently, one way you can give your SEO a boost is to update it. Trying out new keywords, updating the statistics, and adding additional sections for Google to pull as featured snippets can all help your content’s SEO. You should also regularly be performing content audits so you can find other low-hanging SEO opportunities.
Local Traffic Will Be Your Bread and Butter
Around 46 percent of all Google searches are for local services. If you want your business to be competitive in 2021, you will need to focus on your potential local customers (and local competition). These are some of the most valuable Google searches since they’re most likely to be further down on the buying funnel.
For example, if you own a Sushi restaurant in Salt Lake City, Utah, people searching for “Sushi in Salt Lake City” will most likely want to go to your actual restaurant. While people simply searching for “Sushi” may simply want to learn more about the food, or are looking for a recipe. Focusing on ranking for those local search queries will bring you more business and get you more bang for your buck.
Taking advantage of local searches, including:
Don’t Ignore The Power Of Backlinks
Thinking like a PR agent should be a big part of your SEO strategy heading into 2021, because getting the word out around town about your business will require a bit of finesse and a lot of patience. Approaching local news and media about your business with a handful of story ideas they can cover can help get your business noticed and help catch people’s attention. Google sees backlinks from other websites essentially as a vote of confidence in the site—having more links that link back to your site will help you rank higher and get more traffic.
Having both an internal and external link building strategy in place needs to be a part of your overall SEO strategy—yes, it can be time consuming and expensive, but it’s worth it.
Since Google will be looking more closely at content and links in 2021, you need to make sure all of your link building efforts are above board. Don’t try to buy links. If you get caught (and you will), your site will take a big SEO hit and it will be harder than ever to recover and have customers find your business.
Improve UX/UI
Turns out, 88 percent of online shoppers who have a bad UX experience on a website never return. Your product may be what your potential customers are looking for, but if your website is difficult to navigate or makes it hard for your customers to actually order your product, they’re going to look somewhere else. When auditing your website for ways to improve your website’s UX and UI, you should look for:
Make sure you do extensive testing to see which features and layouts perform better with your customers than others. Focus on bounce rate and session duration to see whether something is working better than others in your A/B testing—one study suggests your bounce rate to be in the 26 to 40 range.
SEO can be difficult to understand at times, but it’s a crucial part of your marketing strategy that should never be ignored. Taking the time to understand what the data is telling you, and making informed decisions from the numbers will help you not just understand your audience better, it will also help more people discover your business.
Publish Date: February 4, 2021 4:13 PM |
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