Online businesses vie for that number one spot on Google’s search engine results pages. It’s the coveted spot that gets most of the clicks from users, which means if it’s your business, you have a higher chance of getting sales. The ways to get to that top spot has changed over time, and practices you may have thought successful in the past may now be considered bad practices.
Keep updated on the latest in SEO best practices so you will know whether the SEO service offered to you will help your company achieve good results.
Keyword Stuffing is No More
Old-school SEO used to be about stuffing your internal pages with keywords, sometimes even invisible to site visitors just to get the attention of Google’s spiders. This made for unsightly pages that didn’t really care about the human traffic they were getting. If you’re still stuck using this practice, you’ll find your site penalized by Google in no time.
The fix, however, is simple. Use keywords pragmatically and conscientiously to attract readers and give them quality content. Your aim is to help them get the information they need, even if it doesn’t directly lead to sales. Chances are, if they find your site helpful, they will come back and you can retarget them with ads, which may eventually lead to sales. In the end, it’s better for your brand’s overall image, not just its SEO ranking, if you can retain customers because of quality content.
Use “The Voice”
This is not in reference to the show with the same name. Rather, this is about voice searches, which make up a significant percentage of search volumes across all platforms. Users are not just typing their queries. Sometimes, they use their voice and the virtual assistants their devices are equipped with. Alexa is more than just an assistant that helps you play music according to your mood. Virtual assistants can help you with online shopping, general queries about the weather and latest news, and even scheduling appointments, calling contacts, and setting alarms.
Voice searches garner a different set of results than desktop and mobile searches. For you to be included in their search results, target keywords you think customers will use for their verbal queries.
Link to Your Website on Maps
Maps are handy not just for telling directions and distances between establishments. Now, they can also be the searcher’s direct link to the establishment they are looking for. Someone searching for the hotels near their Denver destination will find it convenient if they don’t have to open a separate page just to look up the contact details of that business. When your link and the details of your services are already included in the listing, you become a more attractive prospect for potential customers.
There’s a lot of emphasis on claiming your website across different platforms. This minimizes the chance of a fake profile masquerading as your business and ruining your reputation. It also tells customers that you take care of your profiles and that all the information they can find about you is real.
Even if you’ve been running your business for years, you cannot guarantee that your SEO is working favorably. You may need a couple of tweaks here and there to make it Google-friendly and -compliant.
