Your company can offer top products or services and even boast the best website the World Wide Web has ever seen. But here’s a caveat, if your potential buyers can’t find you online, you don’t exist to them, and they can’t become your customers. So your site needs to be found, which is exactly what effective SEO strategy is designed to accomplish in today’s digital marketing landscape.

An SEO strategy, or search engine optimization strategy, is the process of improving your website’s visibility on the internet.  That is when people are looking for a topic to learn about or products and services to purchase on search engines such as Google. The goal is to make your site as attractive to search engines as possible so they will direct more traffic to your webpage. 

Why is SEO so important?

According to research data from the Search Engine Journal, nearly 100% of online experiences start on a search engine, and Google owns approximately 70 percent of the search engine market share. SEO helps boost your “searchability” rankings, so your site can show up on the right people’s searches and attract them to your site. Meaning, it will logically show up for the specific people your business serves because your site’s offerings are aligned with what they are searching for.

Your website will get more clicks and visitors when your website ranks higher for specific queries or related searches on engines such as Google. For example, a Sistrix study showed that the first organic result on Google Search has an average click-through rate of 28.5%. 

So how do I improve my site’s rankings with SEO? 

You must understand how search engines work first. Google and Yahoo, for instance, release bots or spiders to inspect websites’ content, so they can give their searchers exactly what they’re looking for when using their search engines. They do so by building a library from the information they capture and store from crawling sites on the web. These databases are where they pull from when supplying search results for people’s questions and phrases. 

Website result rankings are assessed through factors such as the content’s relevance. Hence, the better question for your SEO strategy is: How can my site become more relevant, trustworthy, and popular?

The truth is that SEO strategy in digital marketing is never a one-time job. Google algorithms are only getting increasingly smarter at recognizing, authenticating, and ranking content of value online. 

Nonetheless, there are three fundamental principles to develop in making it work: establishing credibility, increasing popularity, and of course, remaining relevant to your market. 

Before you continue reading, you should know there are two general directions in which your strategy can gravitate: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. The first, recommended by Google, entails that you work to improve users’ experience on your website, while the latter involves manipulating the Google algorithm for a higher ranking.

Below are some guidelines we recommend implementing when developing an SEO marketing strategy to position your site at the top of search rankings. 

Focus on organic searches through consistent, quality content for your customers.

Organic search results determine more than 50 percent of visits to websites online. As such, it should be an important component of any corporation’s digital marketing strategy. 

And you don’t need to go viral to organically make it on people’s search results. Instead, the key to ranking high with a solid SEO marketing strategy is sharing helpful, entertaining, or valuable, customer-centric content. 

The internet wants to offer quality content to its users, which it doesn’t create itself, so it will reward websites that do produce it. Such content can be in the form of videos, information, and well-written copy on your site, including product descriptions and blog posts or articles with helpful information.

When you provide content of interest to your market that uses the exact words and phrases they type when searching, you’re “organically” matching your website with your customers’ needs and desires. Think reviews, descriptions, and purchasing details such as “free shipping.” 

This alignment of customer intent and content translates to more and better quality traffic to your site that you don’t have to pay an ad or an affiliate for. Furthermore, content development that serves and adds value to your intended audience helps you build trust and establish authority amongst your customers.

Remember that SEO is part of your customer’s journey from the awareness phase to after they have made their first purchase. It should work within that funnel process as one of the contacts clients have with your brand that ultimately moves them closer to buying.

I don’t have the time to create or learn how to develop all this great content. Should I hire a professional, a consultant, or an SEO agency?

Devising and implementing an adequate SEO marketing strategy for your new website can get really technical once you start evaluating all the nuts and bolts that go into it. 

To do so, you need to establish and keep track of KPIs such as bounce rates, pages per session, top exit pages, organic sessions, keyword ranking increases, and crawl errors, among many others. Quality content creation can be a full-time job in today’s digital marketing. 

Even if you reach the top search spot in your field, your site needs to keep fighting to stay there. There are more than 200 constantly-changing factors at play when it comes to ranking, and these can range from competitor efforts and algorithm updates to changes in user queries. 

Needless to say, there are no guarantees that your current strategy will work in tomorrow’s digital landscape. 

An effective SEO strategy takes continuous work, planning, and optimization to maintain its rankings. It takes identifying new keyword opportunities as well as skillful and recurrent content creation. Ideally, to strengthen your positioning as an authority in your industry, so traffic is constantly driven organically to your company’s website. If this is sounding awfully unfamiliar to you, you might want to consider hiring a Google or SEO specialist. Want to know more or how an SEO expert can help you? Contact an agent at BlueTide to learn about what can work best for your business and website.