Studies find that the average American spends nearly $2000 a year on shopping online, and this trend is only going to increase in the upcoming years. Online marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba offer the comfort of purchasing and delivering everything, from stapler pins to refrigerators, from the comfort of the home. This trend is so popular, that a number of brands now do not even have brick-and-mortar stores, relying completely on online shopping.
While this spells great news for the home-run business, it is not merely enough to have an online presence. If you are simply one among the millions of other companies offering their goods and services online, you are in for some tough competition. To really make a wave online, you need to optimize your online presence. This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes in. SEO is a simple process through which businesses can get traffic by smartly crafting their website. Here are details about how it works, and 7 SEO ways and practices by which you can grow your business.
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Table of Contents
Ranking Your Website Better than Your Competition
SEO involves a series of different internet practices that make your website more user-friendly, and more likely to bring in traffic. The first part of SEO is to analyze your website to see where it places when important keywords (such as your brand, the products you sell) is looked up in a search engine. Most users do not go beyond the first six to eight search results displayed, which means that if your website pops up in the second page, they are unlikely to even see it, let alone read it. To find out how you can make your website more relevant and likely to get the attention you can try free SEO software like Google Search Console. This will offer you a detailed analysis on the number of visitors to your website, the keywords that you should include in the content you create for your blog, and what are the other things you can do to move your website’s name right at the top when someone types the products you deal in.
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Improve the User Experience
Another merit of researching the right keywords is that it creates a good user experience. Once you find out what are the most popular keywords used for your product, you realize what are the things that most consumers want. This means that you can orient your website to reflect this in the best possible manner. This orientation is important to keep your potential customer on your website as well. Most people visiting a website are not there for more than a minute or two unless what they want immediately catches their eye. By getting your website designed well, and having the key features you want to be noticed on visible display, you can be sure to attract and maintain the attention of your visitor.
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Expand Site Stubs
Another way of gaining traffic in the SEO method is increasing stubs and incorporating backlinks into your website. Complicated as this may sound, these are actually quite simple practices. Site stubs are short articles written in the past. While designing your website, you may have initially had a single person introduce small articles and content for your website. However, as your traffic and your outreach grows, you need to increase the length of your article and blogs to better attract your audience. Often, long articles with precise points indicate greater reliability, than short articles of fewer words. By expanding these smaller articles into fuller ones, your website can get quite a bit of credibility.
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Backlinks and Guest Posts
Another method of gaining authenticity, and having people visit your website is by creating backlinks. Backlinks are essentially references to your website, included in other websites so that your website gets recommended and clicked on. Think of it as subtle advertising. Websites like Bloggers’ Outreach create content relevant to your business and have them published on various forums. These articles have mentions of your website, which means that readers are likely to visit your website out of curious interest. One more mechanism is to have guest posts on your blog and website for your product. By having lifestyle expert or social media gurus, or your blogger users write a post about your product on their website is likely to drive their fans and followers towards your website! Plus, this will ensure more hits.
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Better Your Social Network Presence
An important part of SEO is increasing your presence not only on Google and conventional search engines, but ensuring that you have the top hit on websites like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube. It is important to maintain connections with your consumers, so by frequently uploading and updating these pages, you can put out information about your latest services and products. Plus, these sites become important sites of engagement for customer feedback and experience. By creating an active and interactive setup (as well as sponsoring advertisements on these platforms) you can ensure that information disseminates amongst a larger group of people.
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Increase the Site Speed
One of the quickest ways to lose a potentially interested consumer is by having a slow, inactive website. Most amateur-designed websites do not account for a few things, such as the fact that high-definition product photographs, take longer to load. Plus, your website taking a lot of time to load, (as basic websites do) can frustrate your customer and make them simply leave. Part of SEO is to increase the speed of your website. Reduce the file size of your photographs, so that they do not make the website lag. Invest in a package that ensures fast loading speeds for your website. After all, there is nothing worse than a customer being put off by a website because it doesn’t load fast enough.
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Competition Analysis
Finally, the most important part of staying in the game is to use SEO practices to understand what your competition is like. Frequently assess how well your website is doing vis-a-vis other websites. You can do this by having an SEO expert find out what website is outranking you, and by how much. She can also diagnose the sort of changes you need to bring about to have your website rank higher than your competition. This is a repeated process, and you should conduct it every once in a while. This will help you see how your website is fairing, and how it can improve. Simultaneously, you can also update your website to reflect the latest SEO trends and practices!
Whether you are part of a multinational corporation or run a small home-based company, you need a public presence to get customers. In our technology-based world, this public presence is nearly always equivalent to an online presence. By using the marketing practice of SEO correctly, you can ensure that you give the public what it wants, and have your business prosper online!
Author Bio:
Harold Camaya
She is a blogger who loves to write in different verticals. She co-authored Supercharge Organic Traffic: A popular course focusing on Organic Traffic for E-commerce.. Her hobbies are traveling and reading novels.
