Whether you are a small, home-based company or a larger, growing company, you’re going to have to learn to use SEO if you want to survive against the competition. SEO, short for search engine optimization, basically comes down to how your company ranks within search engines, specifically Google.
SEO is extremely important because if your customers and potential customers can’t find you on the internet, you are probably losing a lot of traffic. This leads to a drop in sales and other negative consequences.
To keep this from happening, here are 6 ways you can improve your SEO strategy:
Trends
The world of SEO is constantly changing so each year is going to have different trends. This means that your company will have to keep an eye on what changes are happening and change your SEO strategy accordingly. For 2019 SEO trends, anything that deals with SEO is heavily focused on user intent and back end code that is easy to read by different search engine algorithms.
Not all trends are going to stay around forever, and some may not even become trends. SEO is a lot of guesswork and sometimes what you choose to implement will not be good for your company. When this happens you will have to change your approach and choose different trends that will be good for your company. The best thing to do is to check multiple resources and use trusted sites that are consistently reliable.
Techniques
What are some things that your company is currently doing in your SEO department? Maybe you are focusing really hard on keywords and making sure they flow naturally within the content. This is great, but if this is all your company is focusing on, you may want to bulk up on your SEO diet. There are a lot of different things that you can do for your customers. You can provide them with great content while also making sure that your back-end code is up to par with all of the current algorithm changes.
There are also certain things you want to do so you are not docked by search engines. If you are transferring products or content over to a new website or even within your current site, you want to prevent cannibalization. When keyword cannibalization happens, it means that all of your hard work with keywords and unique content is dinged because there is duplicate content floating around in the interwebs. When you prevent this from happening, your website builds integrity and trust with the search engine provider and your hard work with quality content and other SEO techniques will pay off in the long run.
Development
The goal for most companies is to grow and become the best company they can be. If your company is growing and really taking off, you will find there may be some growing pains involved. You will probably need to update your website or make some changes to your current website.
You may need to go back and update your content and even your coding to make sure it is current. There may be an app that needs to be developed for your company that requires a special team of developers. You should also be keeping track of your reviews online to make sure they reflect your company in a positive manner.
Algorithm changes
At this moment in 2019, Google is the most commonly used search engine on the internet. Any algorithm changes that happen and cause major waves are done by Google. The last Google algorithm update made a lot of noise for many companies. The biggest hit was felt by people in the medical industry because of trustworthiness and credibility. Different companies took a hit in rankings, but most companies were able to make some changes to comply with the update and saw improvements within a fairly short amount of time.
Effectiveness
SEO is particularly concerned with user intent because they want to make sure the work they are putting in is paying off. If you’re, for example, putting all of your focus on content and making sure that it is properly revised and edited and full of keywords, but your users mainly use images and social media, then you are not reaching your customers very well. To prevent this situation, you need to understand your users so your SEO strategy is effective. You will also want to make changes if your customers or audience wants different things or have different needs as time goes on.
Tools and resources
Since SEO has really taken off, there are a lot of different online resources that companies can utilize. Some of these resources are free and simple to use, while others are full time companies dedicated to providing your company with up-to-date services. There is Chicago SEO that will take care of your SEO needs and work closely with you to make sure that your company is accomplishing its goals.
Every company is going to have a unique plan for what they want to accomplish by using SEO. Obviously the main goal is to rank high and get more hits, which will eventually convert into more sales and growth. But not every company is going to need a team of SEO people, or maybe your small company just has one employee who does SEO while fulfilling other responsibilities. This means that when you are looking for services and resources, keep in mind that your company may not need what another company uses.
Having a good SEO team and strategy for your company can do wonders for the longevity and growth of your company. What are some things that you use within your company to make sure your SEO game is strong?
