The Importance of SEO for Online Businesses
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most used expressions when it comes to online businesses. The shift from brick-and-mortar stores to the digital age has completely changed the way businesses operate and thrive today. What was once great customer service is now considered an old practice. How business owners and businesses in general communicate with their clients, offer transparency and set themselves apart from competition is very different now to how it was 50 years ago. Whether you run an online printing company or an online casino which you can view site here, the way that you attract customers nowadays is very different from before.
The Best Ways to Improve SEO
The most important thing to date about having an online store or presence is being found. The internet can often feel like a massive and completely saturated area in which smaller voices are not heard. Fighting against giants such as Coca-Cola who spend millions on ad placements a year will make it hard for a small and bespoke soft drink business to earn the first stop on a Google search. Similarly, a small editorial paper will find it hard to be found under the heaps of Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle ad placements.
One of the best ways to understand where you are earning more attention and where less, is to research and track results. This is possibly the most effective way to see where your site stands with users and competitors alike. The way that SEO works is that a search platform, such as Chrome and Safari with Google, Bing or Yahoo! will rank your site based on a certain number of aspects. For example, the higher the number of people that click on your website, the more popular and needed you appear to search platforms and the higher they will rank you. If your website includes certain keywords that are often searched, again, platforms such as Google and Bing will read those keywords out from your website's text and identify your website as an authority on the matter and again, rank you higher.
Furthermore, creating backlinks is another ingenious way to set your online business up as an authority and establishment that Yahoo! can safely recommend to its users. Backlinks with other business, where they tag you and you tag them and include business links, makes you more real and less like an unvisited and therefore, less trustworthy site for search platforms to recommend.
The benefits of adding additional extensions, over Chrome Analytics for example, are plenty, which is why keeping your eye on how you are performing with SEO is so vital for business success. Here are some areas you should be researching and tracking:
- Keyword rankings: Understanding how your keywords rank and which changes you should make to them to rank higher on a search function is a huge part of SEO. Using more used keywords allows for more visibility to your site and extensions. One thing to note about keywords is that using the most common one is not always the best, as you then become one of millions of businesses using this term. Better is to find a similar word, that has fewer competitors and focus on creating a loyal following base from that smaller pool of users.
- Competitor analysis: Understanding what your competitors are doing and how they are successful is useful information for your business. You can either steer completely away from them to create your own set of users or you can see what works for them and cherry-pick those processes and adopt them directly into your own business.
Optimizing the Future
It is clear from the above that to succeed in a digital world, understanding, researching and tracking certain keywords is a vital step. Certain companies out there are better able to offer ideas and solutions around digital analytics than the average browser analytics dashboard.