Why is SEO important to your website? It is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood by many businesses. Organic search plays a massive role in determining whether your website is a success or not. While designing a beautiful website is important, it will be for naught if it is not built with SEO in mind. Many businesses make mistakes when it comes to keyword research, poor onsite optimization, or the loading time takes too long. It can be tedious and time-consuming to implement an SEO regime, yet the awards far outweigh the benefits. A successful website can’t ignore it for the simple fact that it will increase sales for your online business through brand awareness and legitimacy with your customers.
Finding Your Target Audience
SEO’s cost-effectiveness stems from its ability to target users who are searching for your services and products online. Your first job is to find the right niche. You need to make sure the audience you’ve selected is the one most valuable to you, which may require you to make a switch. Do some market research, conduct surveys, and ultimately settle on an audience that has the highest likelihood of being interested in your brand. Once that is all settled you’ll want to segment your audience based on different stages of the buying cycle. To do this you have the option to shift your content to focus on customers who are just starting to build awareness that a problem exists, or you could pivot to content that caters to people who are ready to buy. When all is said and done, it all depends on who you’re targeting and what your customer goals are.
Finding Long-Tail Keywords
Once you have a target audience and buying cycle stage established, you can start your SEO journey by generating a list of long-tail keyword phrases. From there you can start narrowing them down based on the criteria that you have already established. This allows you to successfully research those phrases, and pinpoint key topics for development that appeal to your target audience. If you’re having trouble with this phase, conducting a survey of your target audience to determine what kinds of content they’d like to see from you in the future is a viable option to determine where your customers are at. Discerning the search habit of your users is the logical next step because that allows you to find out if your demographic has any distinctive habits that will assist your efforts to target them specifically.
Certain demographics search using mobile devices or tools like voice search. Others use the desktop. Learn these search habits and cater to them throughout your campaign. Getting trapped into thinking that all forms of search are the same will do serious damage to your campaigns, and possibly, your brand as well. One of the major benefits of SEO is that is measurable, and you will be able to track what is sticking and what is not in real time.
How to Measure Success
How do you measure the success of your SEO campaigns? With a tool like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs. They allow you to find out who is visiting your website, how they are arriving and what they are doing. If you notice many visitors are finding you through a particular search term, you can use this keyword in more of your content. KPIs are particularly important to help you keep track of your campaign goals and keep track of your progress. Two of the best utilities, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, are not only offered for free, but they are more than sufficient when it comes to tracking most of the KPIs you need.
Organic traffic is arguably the most important metric to keep tabs on. Organic traffic is defined as traffic your company accumulates through appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) without paying for any placement. That’s is the point of SEO sector in the first place. You want your site to rank for keywords related to your niche and to track your overall organic traffic so that you can see how many people are visiting your site as a result of your SEO strategy. There are many other metrics in SEO that are important to track, but, for brevity’s sake, we will just stick with organic traffic in this post.
In short, SEO is vital to any business hoping to thrive in the 21st-century information economy. Any company that ignores it risks getting left behind the competition because if you’re not using it, your competitors are certainly are.
