Establishing an online presence is vital for any modern-day business. Whether you’re selling a digital product or operating out of a brick and mortar store.
You need an online presence to compete in today’s modern and ultra-competitive business landscape.
Having a strong online presence will allow your business to attract new customers consistently. This includes driving people to your website or people physically walking into your store.
Today, the web is jammed full of methods and techniques that promise to drive new traffic to your business and boost your sales. With so much information out there, it can be challenging to understand where to start or what to do.
We recently hosted a podcast with Kris Reid, owner of Ardor SEO. In the podcast, Kris explains how to get your website seen. Kris explains some of the best ways in which his team at Ardor SEO can help your business get found on Google and grow your audience organically.
Start a Blog
Blogging is one of the most impactful methods for driving traffic to your site and improving your SEO. In a vast ocean of business websites, a blog can help you to stand out.
There are several key reasons every business needs its own blog right now.
Quality Content Boost Your SEO
Google loves fresh, high-quality content. It used to be that you could fill a website full of keywords to get found on Google Search (and other search engines) but not anymore.
Google wants everyone to create the best and most authentic content they can for their readers. Do so, and Google will reward you by ranking you higher. Authentic content boosts your credibility and makes you authentic.
If you commit to producing consistently high-quality content, Google and your visitors will love you for it.
Build Traffic
So you have a beautiful website or store, and you’re offering a great product. Great! But there is no point in having either if nobody visits your site.
Blog posts can drive traffic to your site when they become popular. It’s quite simple. You create great content that people find valuable. You share it, they like it, and then they share it again on platforms like Facebook.
This way, your content starts to travel around the web. More people see it, they like it, and then they share it with even more people. This helps drive new traffic to your website and helps get your website found on Google and other search engines.
Up Your Credibility
Let’s say you sell your creative design services. Who cares? What will make anyone buy your designs from you and not your competitors? What makes you an authority in your industry?
A blog is a chance to create your voice and get noticed. It’s the chance to tell people what you know, your expertise, about your services, and prove to the world why people should use your business and not others.
There are a million creative designers offering their services out there. You have to convey what makes you special. Blogs that are consistently producing excellent writing is a sign of how passionate and knowledgeable you are as a business.
This builds trust and credibility. People want to buy from experts and those who are passionate about what they do.
SEO Practices: Optimize Your Content
Creating high-quality, engaging, and authentic content is a must for any business. Next, you need to ensure that content is optimized for SEO.
This simply means you need to make sure Google is attracted to your content. Google has formulated complex algorithms so that it can do it’s very best to provide its customers with the best answers to their questions.
Google crawls the web at incredible speeds to pick up the content it feels is most relevant to a user’s search. For example, if a user searches for “how to set up a website”, Google will do it’s best to find the exact answer.
This particular search automatically brings up a link to the websitesetup.org and their seven steps to help you set up a website. Google has decided that this is the best information available for your query.
Your business needs Google to choose your company. The better your SEO optimization, the better your website traffic and sales will be.
So, apart from creating great content and sharing it, how do you optimize your content for SEO?
Keywords
Keywords are words you will include in your content so that your business can get found on Google Search. Using 1-2 longtail keywords are related to the intent of your target reader will help you rank higher. For example, “the best way to set up a website” if your content is about setting up new websites.
You will then want to include 1-2 other short keywords related to your content. These will need to be placed in specific parts of your post. Think about including the keywords in the title tag, headers & body, URL, and meta description.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
More people use the internet via their mobile than computers. It is essential then that you make your website mobile-friendly.
All those Google searches that relate to your content are mostly searched via a mobile phone.
Google also displays mobile-friendly results first.
You don’t want to miss out on those opportunities. If your website doesn’t work correctly on mobile, you’re losing thousands of potential customers.
You can use responsive design which will allow your website to be viewed beautifully across all formats, including mobile, computer, and tablet.
Optimize Your Meta Description
The meta description is the small additional text you will find sitting under each link when you search on Google. A meta description briefly explains to users what this particular link is about before they decide to click.
A meta description helps users to decide whether they want to click the link or not based on the information given. For best practice, you should limit your meta descriptions to just 300 characters. You want to be as close to 300 characters as possible but not over.
Make sure you include your longtail keyword in your meta description. This will ensure the keyword is highlighted in bold when your link pops up in a users search results.
Attract Backlinks Naturally
Backlinks are a great way to drive new traffic to your site. The SEO gurus, Moz, conducted a study that showed a clear correlation between the number of backlinks and increased website traffic.
A backlink is simply a link from one website to another website. 99.2% of all the top Google results feature at least one backlink within the page content.
The success of a backlink is based on whether the link is organic and credible. Backlinks that are featured in authentic and high-quality content perform well with Google.
However, Google will penalize any web page that it believes to be using unnatural backlinks. An unnatural backlink is a link that is intended to manipulate Google’s Page Rank system or considered part of a link scheme.
So, how do you attract natural backlinks that Google does like?
Create Information-Rich Content
Don’t forget who your content is for, the user. Your content should exist because it offers users something interesting or useful. Other websites and businesses will naturally link to your content if it is information-rich and above all else, beneficial to the user that views it.
Creating poor content will only lead to a higher bounce rate (when a user immediately closes a web page because it didn’t answer their query). A high bounce rate can worsen your SEO ranking, getting penalized by Google.
Always create high-quality and valuable content that people will want to share.
Create Infographics and “Listicles”
Infographics are an innovative way of sharing relevant information in a concise and easily digestible form. Infographics are those vertically long images made up of text, data, and smaller images.
Listicles are articles or blog posts that answer complex questions by listing out the answers in a clear and concise structure. The headlines of listicles usually read something like “Top 10 Hacks for a Long & Healthy Life”.
Research has shown that both infographics and listicles have the highest engagement on social media. This means people love to share them.
The more a post is shared, the more chance it has of being recognized by authority websites and influencers. They will then likely backlink your post in their own posts. This creates natural backlinks for your website.
Ask Other Companies to Give You a Backlink
This may sound strange. Your competition is hardly going to refer to your website and vice versa. However, there are many companies in your industry that you won’t be directly competing with.
Asking these companies to create great content with backlinks is a simple way to gain new natural backlinks. You can then do the same for them with your content. This way, you’re helping to better rank each other’s business.
For example, if you sell natural makeup, you could contact a natural shampoo company. You’re not competitors because you sell two different products, but you’re in the same industry. This ensures your backlink comes from an authoritative source and is credible.
To be successful with this method, both parties must create high-quality and authentic content. If only one of you creates good content, the other isn’t benefiting from the backlinks, and the users won’t read the content.
Sailing to Success Podcast With Lyndsay Phillips and Kris Reid From Ardor SEO
Watch the full episode on YouTube.
Podcast Summary:
Kris Reid started out as a software engineer and worked for a variety of companies before he took a break from the corporate world to backpack and find his passion. He ended up developing a game and was looking for ways to promote it, which led him to learn about SEO. He started creating tools that increase website ranking, which is now the basis of his company Ardor SEO.
Ardor SEO is the ultimate multi-national backlink building company that helps businesses achieve utmost success in their respective niches by using the most innovative methods of marketing online, including search engine optimization, reputation management, search engine ranking and link building.
Main Questions Asked:
- What is authority building?
- What makes an authority site?
- How do you find out how many people are linking to your website?
- How has podcasting helped?
- What makes content high quality?
- What are the things that people do that they shouldn’t be doing?
Key Lessons Learned:
Authority Ranking
- Google uses an authority algorithm to rank websites in it’s search results, when a website links to another website the linked site is considered to have more authority.
- The main factor in your Google ranking is your Domain Authority. Location of the searcher also plays a big part.
- Domain Authority is a complicated algorithm, but a big part is the number of websites linking back to your site.
- Social media has very little authority and won’t impact your Domain Authority.
- Create high quality, useful content that people will want to link to. Google’s highest priority is creating a good user experience.
- Strategic partnerships are a good way to build links and increase authority.
- Podcasting is a great way to your reputation and get your content linked to.
- Content marketing and SEO is a long game, it takes time to get results but it’s worth it.
- Search Engine Marketing could be a better option for certain businesses, but once you stop spending money on ads the traffic stops. SEO is organic and more consistent.
Link Building
- All things being equal, the site with the most links win.
- Not all links are equal, Google will actively punish spammy, low quality links.
- Reach out to people in other non-competing industries and build win win relationships.
Content
- Focus on creating content that is natural and made for the user.
- Bounce rate is an important ranking factor. If your content is low quality and the reader leaves quickly, it will impact your rankings.
Final Tips
- Stick to what you know, hire an expert to take care of your SEO.
- Focus on high quality content and building your reputation as an authority in your space, the links will follow.
- Don’t try to game the system, it’s not a good long term strategy for success.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
