It’s that time of year again. Brands around the world are vying for consumer attention as spending increases during the holidays. Whether product-driven or service-driven, we see brands amp up promotional efforts, revamping their websites and investing in online advertisements to maximize their reach.
So how do you, whether an industry professional or business owner, cut through the clutter online to propel your brand to the top? Simple — search engine optimization, better known as SEO.
We’ve all seen the three-letter acronym at some point along the line — the kicker is knowing what exactly it is, or better yet, what it does. Simply put, SEO is the practice of enhancing the quality of your online content to drive more users to your website, making it easier to find.
By implementing proper SEO on your website (the optimization component of the acronym), search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! will more accurately display the product or service you’re attempting to promote (the search engine component of the acronym).
Keep in mind, SEO applies to organic search traffic, not paid. Brands putting paid support behind their promotions will almost always rank top of page on any given search result index. Search engine optimization is a method to get your product, service, or brand as high up in ranking on the index — under the paid search traffic — as possible.
By now, you’re probably wondering, “where do I start?” Unfortunately, maximizing SEO for an entire website takes time. However, there are small steps you can begin to take that will jump-start your brand’s online visibility and presence.
- Be sure the backend to your webpage has a Yoast SEO plugin or similar tool. These will be your best friends in maximizing SEO as they measure the readability, accessibility, and overall presence of your online post in real-time.
- Uncover the best “focus keyword” and implement it throughout a page. This can be a word or phrase used often in your content. It will be the information search engine crawlers pull when building indexes.
- Always create a meta description when available. This is a 135-160-character snippet — a tag in HTML that summarizes your page’s content. When you envision a Google search, this is the chunk of visible text below the link. You’ll want the focus keyword to be included here.
If you’re already doing these things, then you’re a step ahead on the road to online conquest. Check back the first week of 2018 for the second installment in this series where we will offer tips in maximizing the readability of your online content, uncovering the best focus keywords, and crafting the perfect meta description.
