How to create an effective SEO strategy for your business

The digital world is constantly expanding and evolving and having a strong presence online is now crucial to helping your business grow and compete against your competitors in either a local or global context. One of the keys to this growth is appearing higher on google and maintaining strong rankings for your industry across the search engines.

This is why SEO is so important to helping small businesses grow as it targets specific terms that your target audience will be searching for in order to generate clicks, interest and ultimately leads. Building an effective SEO strategy is easier said than done and it can be incredibly easy to lose track of your plan and spend a lot of time and money on nothing.

However, that doesn’t mean that SEO is an unassailable victory; a lot of the most effective strategies involved with SEO are common sense. After all, it is all about reaching your audience and giving them what they want to see. It’s that simple and overcomplicating it is one of the most common issues with SEO strategies. Therefore, we’ve put together a list of tips to help you build out an effective and simple SEO strategy that will help boost site visits, improve the health of your traffic and start to generate you more useful leads. While there is no sure thing in SEO, maintaining a strategy and having a clear plan is the best way to ensure that growth is consistent.

Know Your Keywords and Your Industry

When starting out with SEO, it can be easy to go ‘I want to rank for X/Y/Z’ and not really know why. What keywords you want to rank for all boils down to what your customers are going to search for. Also remember that Google is an insanely competitive marketplace so you need to be able to identify what your USP is and how best to portray that in your rankings.

For example, you are a local hotel looking to promote your business on Google. If you target terms such as ‘hotel’ or ‘local hotel’, you are unlikely to see much progress as you are going to be smaller than the bigger chains in your industry. However, you could target something more specific that relates more to your business and what people come to you for. For example, ‘dog friendly hotels’ or ‘budget places to stay’ would likely give you more success than those incredibly broad industry terms.

Apply the same thinking to your business and what customers actually come to you for and you’ll start to build out a more reliable and beneficial keyword ranking list that will generate the specific customers you want to reach.

Write Relevant Content

When starting a new piece of content, always ask yourself ‘why are you writing this?’ and look at your target keyword(s). If the keyword or the specific topic of your content isn’t relevant or useful to your main target audience then scrap it and don’t write it. When writing content, you need to be constantly thinking about who the audience is and what their journey to find your content is.

To go back to the hotel example, a hotel might create a piece of content on local hotspots or unknown local treasures. This is relevant to their audience because it offers something beyond the regular service, gives good information about the local area and is still relevant to people looking to stay in the local area.

This is the sort of content that you should be providing your audience with. Content that expands beyond what you offer but is still highly relevant. Other examples might be 'reasons to visit the local area’ or ‘things to try on your next coastal trip’. The goal of SEO content is to answer a question that your audience wants answered and to meet them at that point of interest before they decide to go with a competitor. The user journey in the above is 

‘Wants to visit an area’ - ‘searches for things to do’ - ‘reads your article’ - ‘looks for places to stay with your brand front and centre in their mind’

It’s a natural way of leading your potential customers down a path they haven’t really considered before and it’s something that is increasingly becoming a focus of Google’s algorithm so the more content you can generate in this vein, the better your rankings will be.

Review Your Site Content

When writing your site copy, you need to put a heavy focus on what it tells your customers coming to your site. Avoid the generic at all costs and try to match your brand as closely as possible. You want the content to match what your audience expects to find when they search for your business. Also, make sure you are including your keywords on the key pages to help boost their ranking potential and to help the customer experience when people actually click onto your site. 

Hire An Expert

SEO is mostly common sense as mentioned above. However, it is wise to hire a SEO expert to ensure your site is truly optimised. An SEO agency will have more knowledge of where the problems lie with your website and how best to address them. They’ll also have far more knowledge of how to fix technical issues and provide more perspective on what your site data means. While they will cost more money than doing it yourself, it will save you a lot of time which can be even more valuable as a small business owner.

With SEO work, you don’t need to be a wizkid. Most of this work is generally just focused on making content that appeals to your audience and gives them what they want, which you should have a good idea of what they are looking for anyway. The key to this is to create an SEO strategy that is detailed and thorough and then stick to it as much as possible. You may make the odd tweaks as you learn more about your audience and how the strategy works out but it’s crucial to give this time and allow it to grow naturally. Rome wasn’t ranked on the first page in a day and all that.