3 SEO Strategies You Need for Your Small Business

It’s said that if you build it, they will come. But that’s never been true. With so many websites online, you need to find consumers and get them to visit your virtual storefront. That’s what SEO — search engine optimization — is designed to accomplish. One source notes there were about 1.13 billion websites online. Considering only 18% of them are active, that means around 200 million websites are active. That means your website is a tiny needle in a huge virtual haystack. SEO can increase your website’s visibility. 

Leveraging the power of SEO is like using a digital net to capture consumers fitting your target customer demographic. So, SEO can help you more effectively reach consumers. But you must use the right strategies to rank at or near the top of search engine results pages. Otherwise, you’ll lose out to rival businesses with better SEO strategies.

Here are three SEO techniques for digital marketing best practices that attract consumers.

1. Focus on Keywords Your Rivals Are Ranking for

If you’re not looking at keywords consumers input into search engines, you’re not doing keyword research. And that’s a mistake. But even if keyword research is part of your digital marketing strategy, consider keywords your business isn’t ranking for while your competition is. You can take steps to ensure you rank for these keywords, too.

Targeting the right keywords is vital — and there are tools you can use to make keyword research easier.  For instance, you can use the Keyword Gap solution. Once you open it, input your domain name in the area that says “You”. After that, add your top rivals’ domains and press the “Compare” button. 

 

2. Docs on Acquiring More Backlinks

How is your backlinking strategy? One way to increase the effectiveness of your SEO strategy is to acquire more backlinks, which refers to getting more companies to list your URL on their blogs, articles, and other online content. You’ll achieve a greater domain authority status when you acquire a critical mass of backlinks. 

Domain authority is a metric that predicts the odds of a website ranking on search engine result pages. It goes from a scale of zero to 100. While a domain authority score doesn’t factor into Google’s search engine algorithm, achieving a high score usually goes hand-in-hand with other SEO best practices. A good domain authority score usually boosts the odds of people clicking backlinks to check out your website. 

That’s one reason to focus on acquiring backlinks from reliable domains. It’s about having a plan and rolling it out strategically. It’s no different than any project in life. If you’re building an outdoor kitchen, you’ll explore outdoor kitchen ideas, choose the right one, and have it installed. The same thing applies to building a new home. You’ll need a plan and strategy for success. When planning your SEO strategy, you must be strategic. It won’t work unless you understand how to go about it, plan the right strategy, execute it, and assess how your SEO initiative is going from time to time.

3. Metadata

You also need to ensure your metadata is on point. Metadata refers to descriptive information about a resource. Metadata ensures data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. When people look through search engine results pages, the first things they see are meta titles and meta descriptions. 

Focusing on your metadata is a good idea if you want to be on the right side of Google’s algorithm. Google uses crawlers to comb over websites and gather data that lines up with search queries. The better your metadata, the better Google can assess the relevance of your pages.

These are three things to consider if you want to make your SEO strategy more effective. Failing to use the right techniques will jeopardize your SEO goals and reduce the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing initiatives.