One of the must-haves for any business, being at the top of Google results is of the utmost importance. It doesn't matter if you have a website for a small beauty salon or an e-commerce site for a big retail company, you need potential customers to visit your page so you can profit! This can be successfully done through a proper online marketing strategy and following some clear instructions.
When it comes down to the basics for a successful optimization process, we distinguish three main aspects in which SEO professionals usually focus on: content, local SEO, and the combination of page and domain authority. Keep reading to understand why and how you need to work towards this for top Google results!
At the heart of every website is its content. As to understand what you offer, what you write on your site must be useful for both potential customers and Google bots. On the one hand, you need to properly communicate what you do so that your site's visitors are attracted to your products or services, persuading them to make a purchase. On the other hand, the information available on your website must be clear and legible for Google. If the search bots find keywords placed in a proper structure, they will rate your website higher and place it on the top of Google's results.
As you may have already realized, Google results are very competitive. If you want to get the most of your online marketing strategy, first you will need to decide which keywords for your website are the most interesting. We suggest thinking about what makes you stand out from competitors in your sector and work with the keywords that show how you're unique. For example, if you sell jackets and are locally based in Chester, you may optimize your website for keywords as "leather jackets Chester" or "winter jackets Chester". If you feel your differences lie in the products as you sell top-quality jackets, you can also optimize using keywords such as "high-quality leather jacket" or "high-quality winter jacket".
As previously mentioned in this post, you need to take care of your page and domain authority. These are indicators of how your website is perceived by Google and other search engines, comparing the importance of your site to the ones of your competitors. Usually, a website with high domain authority has a large amount of other relevant pages linking to it. Hence why a proper link-building strategy is essential for successful optimization.
In order to develop this, first, you need to know the most relevant pages in your sector and the websites on which your competitors get their links. Google usually values well-known websites that are linked by important sites of the same sector. For example, if you have a restaurant website, it would be nice to get links in other pages related to culinary recipes and/or gastronomy guides.
This is clear, but how does one get these links?
Paying for links on other websites may be the easiest but we don't suggest doing this. It might cost a fair amount of money to get the desired amount of links and there is the risk of getting penalized by Google. Conversely, we suggest contacting other webmasters in hopes of negotiating some form of collaboration. For example, it's entirely plausible to exchange links between your website and one you are interested in. That way both parties win since you and the other person will get a link, showing improvement for you both in Google's eyes. Another suggestion is looking for guest posting options: there are a lot of websites that offer the opportunity to write for them in exchange for letting you publish some links to your site. In this case, the pages allowing guest posting to get fresh new content and you improve your domain authority.
If you have a website specifically for a shop, restaurant, or any other physical business you NEED to work on local SEO. Many people look for a specific business online and if you want to be visible it is always advisable to be present in the main online directories. These are platforms indicating the businesses available on your city's map. As you may know, the most necessary one is called Google My Business, and if you are registered on this platform your business appears in Google Maps, allowing people to leave their comments on it. This is very interesting since the reviews act as recommendations for new visitors and customers. In any case, there are dozens of relevant directories for whichever sector your business fits into.
As you can see, there are clear steps towards optimizing a website successfully. If you need help with it, rankingCoach will always be glad to support you. rankingCoach is a do-it-yourself platform guiding you through the whole SEO optimization process with easy, step by step, video tutorials for all of the popular CMSs. If it sounds good to you, you can try it for free by clicking here or contact our support team through the email support@rankingcoach.com