Do you target France? Or maybe you have a local San Diego business? And your company has a nice and professional looking website adapted to your audience? Well done. The bad news is: it’s not enough!
Your site has to be « search engine friendly » if you want your prospects to find you when they need you. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies and techniques to make sure that you appear in search engines like Google when a certain set of keywords are entered in the search box.
Why precisely should you spend some time and money on SEO?
Well, the facts speak for themselves:
• In USA, 90% of local shoppers look online first and the most common tool used is search
• 70% – 85% of search engine users click on the organic search results (aka natural or non-sponsored results), while only 25% will click on a sponsored or Pay Per Click ad. As you can understand, getting good search engine positioning will help you grow your business.
But there are many other good reasons to optimize your website:
• Reach your target audience
• Build your reputation online
• Increase your presence on a local or global market: how your company’s site is found can be difficult with so many regional, national, and even international options. That’s why using SEO techniques can be the difference between high traffic and being lost in an ocean of information.
• Low investment for high growth: optimization has more predictable long-term costs and ROI metrics as compared to other components of marketing strategies.
What is Search Engine Optimization by the way?
While SEO may sound simple and easy to do, it takes considerable planning and knowledge, and may take several months to deliver results. SEO is relying on marketing strategies, website code programming, architecture and persuasive copywriting techniques. Many factors have to be considered when optimizing a website. Some of them are on-page factors (on your website) and some are off-page (on other websites linking to yours). Today, Google ranks websites using more than 200 criteria as part of their algorithm. This algorithm, one of the best kept secrets in the world, changes very often of course!
And with the rapid growth of social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs, an entire new layer of techniques are being deployed to strengthen SEO : Social Media Optimization (SMO) techniques.
How do you rank ? This has to be your next question actually. Before doing any changes, make sure you evaluate your website with an SEO audit. It should at least include your search engine reputation, a technical audit, your website content analysis, your current keywords rankings, links analysis and your competition analysis. Once you know what can be improved, you will have to spend a few months working on SEO before you can really see any change. And yes, this is a never-ending process so you want to have a monthly SEO plan.
As you can guess, SEO is a very trendy topic and scams are around you at each and every step of the project. In my next post I will cover SEO myths and warning signs of bad SEO companies. Stay tuned and let me know if you have questions!
Source : Julie Mazziotta
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