A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy that is developed in alignment with your business goals can drive real and measurable impact for your company. SEO takes time to cultivate and you won’t see positive results overnight. But once your strategy starts to take effect, your SEO efforts will give your business a valuable edge over the competition. Here are some tips to help you develop an effective SEO strategy that promotes growth for your company.
Create Content That Informs
A solid content strategy is the foundation of a growth-oriented SEO strategy. By creating content that is informative, useful and provides value to prospective customers, you’ll slowly build their trust in you as the right resource to solve their pain points. You’ll also build credibility with search engines, helping to increase your organic rankings.
The content you create should be hyper-focused on the needs of your target audience. Get to know them and what they care about. From there, you can develop content that supports prospects at every stage of their buyer journey. Here are examples of the kind of content to create at the different stages:
Discovery stage. Blog posts are a powerful tool to increase organic search, promote social shares and showcase your company’s knowledge and expertise. Other content formats for the discovery stage include podcasts, infographics, press releases, videos, email newsletters and social media content.
Consideration stage. Whitepapers, case studies and product videos with statistics are effective for engaging prospective customers in the consideration stage. Such content connects the problem they may be trying to solve to how your company can offer an effective solution.
Conversion stage. Interactive guides, webinars, demos and free trials are great content to present at this point. You’re showing how buying your product or service will solve their problem. It’s the final push.
Use Free Tools To Improve Performance
Thanks to tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can move beyond simple pageview data. Analytics provides a wealth of information including site visits, bounce rates, average time spent on the site, demographics, and so much more. More search-engine focused, Search Console prioritizes your impression and click data as it relates to your organic search queries, rankings and pages to better understand the keywords that are working to gain organic traffic to your website.
Utilizing both tools, you can use the organic search query impression, click-through rates and position data from Search Console to optimize pages that Analytics shows to have little or no traffic. Conversely, you can also use this data to improve your best pages.
Stay Up-To-Date & Plan For The Long Term
Search engines like Google are constantly altering their algorithms. Follow industry giants such as Moz, Neil Patel and Search Engine Land to stay on top of the latest SEO news. You’ll also want to track and evaluate your SEO reports to spot traffic swings that are dependent on industry events, news, seasonality and even competitor sales.
SEO rankings take time to develop and change. You simply can’t set it and forget it— you’ve got to be ready to continually put in the work to keep your SEO strategy on track. Many companies partner with agencies like Bayshore Solutions, given the complexity and time-consumption associated with a good SEO strategy. But if you follow the above tips, you can build your own strategy that one day will have you on the first page of search results.
Kevin Hourigan is the President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions and for over 23 years, his company has provided clients with digital solutions that grow their businesses. To contact Kevin, please email [email protected].
