SEO, or search engine optimization, involves planning and executing certain practices to improve your ranking on search engines.
But, why does ranking matter? Think about the results page on Google. When’s the last time you searched past the first page?
SEO can help your business land on the first page of the results page, helping you expand your audience and generate measurable growth.
In this article, we’re going to share some key ways to develop an effective SEO strategy for scaling your business.
Collaborate With an SEO Agency
If you don’t have a lot of time on your hands and not many team members to help you out, you may want to consider hiring an SEO agency.
An SEO agency will do the heavy lifting for you by assessing competitors, generating leads, and honing in on the areas where you can improve sales.
If you’re interested, this Auckland SEO agency offers free 30-minute consultations.
Build a List of Keywords
Keywords are one of the fundamental principles of SEO. You should always start with keyword research if you are trying to develop an SEO strategy.
Keywords are words or phrases that search engine users use to find whatever they’re looking for. For example, a keyword for a bakery in Houston would be “Houston bakery” or “bakery in Houston.”
Google auto-populates keywords while you type. The ones that appear higher in the list have higher search volumes.
When deciding what keywords you want to include on your website, think about what words your target demographic might use to find your products or services.
Remember, you shouldn’t always use the most competitive keywords because it can be hard to rank against higher-performing sites. Sometimes, you’re better off choosing keywords with a lower search volume.
Build Page Links
Building page links is another essential SEO strategy. Let’s break it down into two strategies for link building.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is when you locate broken links on another site and offer your content up as a replacement.
Send outreach emails to people who run websites with broken links and ask them to consider linking you in a post.
A lot of the time, website owners don’t even realize that they have published content with links that don’t work.
Competitor Analysis
The first step of this strategy is to find a site that ranks for a keyword you also want to rank for.
Then, check out their backlinks. Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. They are also called inbound links or incoming links.
Look through each of their backlinks and locate pages that could benefit from your link.
For example, if a high-ranking article about the best DSLRs on the market links to other camera resources, you can be featured on that list if you have similar content available.
Shorten URLs
When it comes to Google search results, short URLs perform much better than long URLs.
When you write your URLs, try to include keywords. If you can, only include keywords in the URL.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is a tried and true SEO strategy. This is when you link from high-authority pages to pages that aren’t performing as well.
The difference between internal linking and external linking is that internal linking occurs between pages on the same site. External linking includes links to other reputable sites.
Internal linking helps you connect your content and gives search engines an overview of how your content is structured.
Strong internal linking increases page views, improves your ranking, and enhances usability through anchor text.