Search Engine Optimization
SEO for organic visibility
Ranking on organic search results is crucial to grow your business. SEO or search engine optimization is a long-term process that ensures your presence in the search engine indices. This is highly critical to your digital marketing efforts.
When you buy a product or service, would you buy from a newbie or from a pedigreed brand that comes up on search all the time? Visibility matters!
SEO is your ROCK!
Every online marketing effort revolves around search engine optimization. In short, all or any online marketing efforts without an effective SEO process is like pouring your resources down the drain.
SEO – focus on customers!
A focussed SEO approach to enhance organic rankings integrates many critical factors. Customer-centricity is the key here. Fine-tune your SEO efforts towards customers, not search engines, or their updates. Never use strategies to beat them, use to align with them. Search engines exist to help you, not to compete with you.
The more your focus on customers using Search Engine Optimization efforts, the more search engines will reward you and not vice-versa. If your SEO efforts are directed to hoodwink search engines, you will only end up getting blacklisted and that, is a great fall to recover from.
Leave the search engines to their business, mind your own!
Why search engine optimization?
Relevant traffic
Majority of relevant traffic to any website comes from search engines and not from social media, paid advertising or other channels. SEO is critical.
What kind of traffic?
* Targeted traffic
Traffic without conversions or sales is just a statistic and this is not what a business needs. Targeted, relevant, or quality traffic is the visitors coming to your website looking for products or services that you offer. This should is the goal for SEO or any other digital marketing process.
* Conversion equation
Targeted traffic will have higher chances of conversions and thus, more customers. More than just visitors, it is the relevant or targeted visitors that matter. Which is a good scenario for your business – 10,000 visitors and 10 conversions, or 1,000 visitors with 10 conversions? That is 0.1% & 1% cconversion. Focus on growing targeted traffic.
* Reputation and branding
A targeted visitor coming to your website and finding relevant information is a satisfied visitor, irrespective of whether he converts immediately into a customer or not. In the long run, chances of his returning are higher and this is a big boost to your reputation, credibility, and branding.
* Profitability and survival
Targeted traffic is critical to sustainable business. Just having traffic and no customers will only bring down the business due to lack of sales and profitability. Therefore, all your SEO or digital marketing practices should make it a goal to generate “targeted traffic” and not just “traffic”.
Long-term benefits
SEO practices build long-term digital assets that will get results over time. Remember, a piece of content is omnipresent, an advertisement is not.
SEO is a long-term asset
* Google changes constantly
Google has changed consistently over the years in the form of updates – both big and small. Needless to say, these updates have made and broken businesses across the internet. Those that perished, focused on playing the search engines, and those that flourished, focused on the visitors. That’s over 15 years of experience, time to trust the process.
* SEO games are way too many
It’s always a dog-eat-dog competition out there when it comes to SEO. Everyone out there, millions of websites do SEO in their own way, to outrank you, whether it is your competitors, informative websites or even just third-rate link farms. And the competition is ever-changing. Survival of the fittest – understand what you are up against.
* Patience pays
With SEO, you must understand that it takes time, a very long time. As per data, given the same set of keywords, only 5.7% of the pages make it to the top in a year. And, the average time taken by them to get there is about 2.5 years. The more competitive your keywords are, the more time it takes. Remember, you are not running an SEO agency, you should focus on your core competencies and leave SEO to dedicated agencies like ours. And of course, be patient.
* Long-lasting benefits
You could say, good PPC brings you good traffic. That happens only when you spend tons of money, month on month. You stop spending and it all goes away.”Spike of hope to flatline of nope”. So, no long-term benefits there. In a long-term approach to good-quality, honest SEO, you can stop spending on search engine marketing quite quickly. The bottom line is – good SEO never stops.
Evolved engagement
Good SEO practices should adhere to proper ranking factors. Over time, search engine optimization is more effective than paid advertising.
Engage in buying funnels!
* Primary traffic
Organic search brings primary traffic to your website, and is a critical cog in the sales funnel that drives engagement and conversions. Focus on Google since it owns over 85% of the search market, however, do not ignore the smaller players. Quality SEO and, a well-oiled, branded website will ensure that Google ranks your business well.
* Trust and credibility
A clean and credible website along with white-hat SEO is the foundation to success. Search engine indexing parameters are many, and the goal of SEO is to adhere to those during execution. This will ensure your business has an authoritative position on the search indices or SERPs.
* User experience
Once the indexing parameters are taken care of, take care of user experience which is highly critical to conversions as well as good rankings. Google interprets user experience through bounce-rate and time-on-page factors, and ranks your website accordingly. Keep track of Core Web Vitals.
* Buying cycles
The biggest advantage that your online presence offers to the buyer is the ability to undertake due diligence and research. A good SEO strategy helps send authentic and informative messaging to buyers helping them make the right decisions and guides them through the buying cycle.
Exponential results
All SEO efforts to build assets across the digital space are permanent. Any new efforts will only add to the past and bring in new exponential results.
Content for exponential SEO
* The content angle
All digital marketing revolves around content, the written word, including SEO. Be it in the form of website content or blogs that integrate relevant keywords and key phrases. As far as densities go, it is everyones game, though search engines don’t refrain from punishing overdoses. Content is very important for SEO and having a couple of in-house or outsourced subject matter experts creating content is essential to drive exponential SEO results.
* How much content and what kind
Well, that’s a well-kept secret and differs from domain to domain and what you are looking to achieve. One thing though, it is always about quality over quantity. Give a thorough thought to how you are presenting it, that is a very important factor, always ignored. Cater to search intent.
* Frequency and longevity
How much to publish, when to publish how to distribute and how to analyze are a few things that are competition-specific. Answering these questions, keeping in mind, your vision and mission are crucial, do not delve on how the industry does it. That’s the USP of having an internal inbound marketing team, who we feel should be of the domain mindset and not the SEO mindset.
* Search Engine Optimization process quality
The quality of your SEO process, assuming that everything is hunky-dory, in terms of being white-hat, depends on the quality of your content. Simply put, the results are directly proportional. If you are putting out good content, on schedule, there is no reason to not see results in good time. Putting aside all these, SEO is about discipline and quality, do you have the edge?
Elements to keep in mind
Good SEO strategy
Search engines evolve daily, so, it is important to have a scalable long-term SEO strategy that is honest, and works in the best interest of visitors.
Clean SEO cannot be beaten
* Content & Keywords
Effective content and proper use of keywords is the backbone of a good search engine optimisation strategy. Content essential to the customer, informative, well presented and error-free works best. Sprinkling keywords using them naturally, works wonders. Remember, you are creating a long-term digital asset that will bring your rewards.
* Meta tags
Each of your webpages should have proper meta tags to enable search spiders to index the page properly. Ensure that they are of the correct length and have been written well and not for the sole purpose of seqrch engine opotimization. Meta tags should define your business perfectly, which will make it interesting for a prospect to visit your website.
* Backlinks
Backlinks are critical for good SEO. They are like word-of-mouth publicity in the digital world. Since others are going to publish links to your website, you should have great content and shareable information to further the cause.
* Sharing and social
Though social media marketing is not considered a part of SEO, they are finely intertwined since many publish content from the blog or even offers and webpages on social media. Sharing content or distributing it is the best way to get backlinks and some awesome SEO juice.
Analyze Analytics
All SEO efforts should be measured on a continued basis to ensure that it is progressing the right way. Analytic tools are many, choose wisely.
Analytics are important
* Why use analytics?
Analytics are generally used to validate assumptions, create new ideas, find correlations or make decisions regarding a inbound trafic strategy. They present various data points arranged in a myriad of ways. While analysing, always frame your questions ii direct relation to the strategies and objectives of your business.
* How to use analytics?
You could already be an expert on that. We wouldn’t want to get too detailed first up. The devil is in the detail, so we will get there, once we have understood the shifts, patterns and trends. It is time now to define and measure what is going on and if something is not going right, get our problem-skills out. Skirting out problems is critical to any strategy.
* The syntax
Everyone has a different vocabulary for traffic analysis, Google analytics has entirely another. Though not universal, we need to get on the same jargon, so that everyone understands, while working on the same project. You may as well understand the plight of agencies on this element.
* Accountability
The accountability of data collection is always important. While Google Analytics may sprew out some data which may or may not be in line with some other tool like Woopra. We need to understand that the data analysed should be of a standard and come from the same reliable sources.
Before you create a strategy
SEO is a continuous, long-term process that builds business goodwill. Before a strategy is chalked do some important due-diligence and analysis.
Analysis & due-diligence
* Industry and audience
Your business niche and the audience it caters to, should be the primary consideration for any SEO strategy to work. Analyze your industry, the top competitors, localisation of their businesses, their search engine optimization strategies and which of them would be hard to beat, are the equations you need to work upon. These will help you formulate the best workable SEO strategy for now and for the future.
* User intent
While researching and formulating your keywords for SEO, it is important you understand the user intent behind them. Variations of your keywords should capture the user intent to get the best results. Good research into user behaviour can get you a gold mine of keywords.
* SEO for mobile
Make sure that you do not ignore the mobile while building your SEO strategy. Google’s mobile-first index is something that you cannot ignore. Mobile is still the LCM for search, however, a future-proof strategy is always recommended. Prepare today, instead of bracing for a shock.
* Act, do not sit on it!
This is the most important element, is to get it right. Action speaks, strategy doesn’t. The internet topography doesn’t favor the inactive. It is about continuous movement without a pause. You may tweak or revamp strategies but never pause… it will only set you back.
Keep Tweaking
SEO can get real touchy at times. Ensure that the entire process is white-hat and test the entire process regularly to ensure compliance.
Tweak for better
* “Ranking” in SEO?
SEO is a process to make web pages rank on search engines, as high as possible. Click through rate or CTR is highest, when you rank first and decreases magically down the page, and remember 95% of searchers never get to see the second page. More clicks is more business, simple.
* So what is Google looking for?
Google’s mission is to“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And, delivering the best search results is critical to that mission. Google’s bots crawl the web pages, index them and catalog them, only properly optimized web pages.
* How search ranking works?
Unless you web page is crawled and optimized for searched keywords, it will not be listed. Assuming it is, Google will check for other stuff like quality of information on that page, clarity of purpose, relevance of content and quality, website reputation good, time spent on the page, authority of the page and hundreds of other factors.
*Is your page EAT-able?
Does your page showcase Expertise on the topic relevant to the keyword? Is the content Authoritative on the subject? Does it instil Trustworthiness? You could say these are immesureable factors. Google has millions of algorithms to check through these factors before it ranks your web page. So, focus on EAT.
Need SEO services?
At efficaci, we offer cutting-edge SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services coupled with deep-expertise, unique content thats propels the process exponentially. We produce SME (Subject Matter Expert) based content and do not use bot generated content. As an extension we also offer SIO (Search Intent Optimization) services.
Talk to us today for clear, concise, no-fluff, unique SEO processes that will get you results and are bespoke to your business, built with your mission and vision in mind.
The first consultation is on the house – FREE!