Search continues to dominate the field when it comes to increasing conversions. After all, gaining customers starts with sending traffic to your website, and while social media is great for driving referral traffic, nothing beats search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search when it comes to generating qualified traffic to your site. With that said, search engine optimization is a long-term game. This means that you won’t see the fruits of your labor pay off for at least a few months, assuming that you’re doing everything right. Of equal import, search engine optimization requires on-going effort. It isn’t a “set it and forget it” initiative unless you wish to see your traffic and ranking decline in the future. Fortunately, there are several tactics that any brand can do to improve your organic search visibility.
Initially, we take an analytic approach to determine the SEO priority list of high-impact action items to improve upon or implement. The technical aspects of SEO are a good place to start. It behooves you to have someone with back-end expertise help with this. Begin by reviewing the site indexing, inbound and outbound links, duplication issues, error pages and any other technical challenges that may be impacting your site’s performance. From there, move on to the meta tags and ensure that your title tags, headlines and meta descriptions include the proper keywords. Like all things search related, keywords are important so do the research required to ensure that you’re using the most effective keywords for your brand.
During this stage, we also recommend that you examine your website’s site speed and load time. Site speed can impact search visibility and can also affect conversions because slower load times can annoy your customers and result in the loss of a sale. Large image files can be the culprit. Fortunately, they’re easily remedied. However, you should also review your site’s extensions and plug-ins to ensure they aren’t slowing down your site speed too.
Once you’ve tackled the technical aspects, it’s time to focus on the content. When it comes to effective search engine optimization, content is king. If you’re serious about improving your visibility and rank on search engines then it’s time to start writing some fresh, high-quality content. And we do mean high quality. Just another short, fluff piece won’t do. Give your audience something unique and valuable and watch your traffic increase. Adding a blog to your website can be the perfect SEO solution because it provides on-going content optimization, and the ability to include new and trending keywords. It also gives your brand the opportunity to provide sharable content on social media or other platforms which also helps your brand’s search visibility. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving!
Make the investment in your brand’s search engine optimization because the ability to pull qualified traffic to your website is the lifeblood of any brand.
Shahla Hebets is the founder of Think Media Consulting, a digital marketing consultancy firm. Think Media creates smart, relevant, and authentic digital marketing, social media and ecommerce strategies that drive revenue for health and wellness brands.
