Mastering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Google on average processes over 40,000 search queries every second, translating to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. This is driven by consumers who use search engines for a decision to make, a product to buy or a vacation to take. They are the first to adapt to swiftly changing circumstances, and so should your business.
Today many companies are taking a closer look at establishing a stronger online presence and a digital marketing function. As much as 40% of a company’s revenue is captured through organic search traffic and companies cannot afford to overlook this significant amount of digital footfall. According to recent HubSpot marketing statistics, 70-80% of search engine users use organic search results as a foundation for critical decision making on products and services they wish to purchase.
Optimizing your webpages for SEO is going to be even more important in 2020 as organic search continues to gain ground.
With new websites proliferating daily, the online market competition is getting bigger and tougher resulting in the need for better, more tailored, and more engaging content to stay ahead of the competition.
Focusing on those search terms that are unique to your business and that your customers are keying in is paramount to supporting the necessary content creation and benefitting fully from the opportunities that digital marketing presents.
Search Engines find your company’s engaging content by displaying these organic search results to your potential customers based on how optimized your website is, meaning, your SEO and Organic Results go hand-in-hand.
If you are already attempting to gain traffic using SEO and are not achieving your targeted objectives on website traffic, you have either not come up with the right customer search queries that fuel traffic to your site, or your SEO is not properly set up.
Establishing the correct search criteria:
Selecting the correct search queries is something that we can help you with. We use a tried and tested methodology to help our clients distill the correct corporate messages, analyze competition, and understand its buying audiences to help determine the best practice approaches to content, SEO, positioning, and the content dissemination that would follow.
Setting up the SEO function:
- Make sure your website uses https
It is not a game changer in your SEO, but no one wants to open a website that is not secured and neither do search engines. So, make sure that you have installed your SSL certificate.
- Optimize for user intent
User intent, also known as search intent, is the intention by which the user is typing their search phrase. Optimizing for user intent is extremely important as different people are looking for different goals from their search query.
For example, a user looking to move apartments in Dubai and a user planning to move to Dubai might both search for ‘Homes in Dubai.’ However, a user looking to buy an apartment in Dubai and another looking to rent an apartment will have a specific search query such as ‘Buy Apartment in Dubai’ and ‘Rent Apartment in Dubai.’ Therefore, the more your content is optimized, the higher your page will rank.
- Format content properly for featured snippets
Featured snippets have become popular in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and the trend is here to stay. These are small blocks of information that appear at the top of a results page when a user enters a question or a string of keywords. Featured snippets generally contain blog posts selected by the Google algorithm, because they provide the most accurate and relevant information that the user is interested in.
- If ‘Content is King,’ then ‘Backlinks are Aces’ of the SEO game
Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another. According to a study by Brain Dean and his team from Backlinko, backlinks are one of the most important factors in page ranking.
You can get backlinks through writing a guest post or a blog for a reputed website, or by using a broken link method where you ask companies to redirect their broken links with content similar to yours back to your website.
- Pay attention to Page Headings, subheadings and URLs
Search engine robots recognize headings, subheadings and decide which part of the page is most important and what it contains. Your page heading and subheadings should contain your keyword based on your user’s intent.
Once your search queries are properly defined and you’ve cleaned house by following our tips on setting up the SEO function, then you are ready to start developing content that will help your business grow.