Note: This was featured as part of our Web Wednesday segment on Charleston’s 105.5 The Bridge with Box in the Morning. You can catch us every Wednesday morning at 8:20 am ET for your dose of social media & digital marketing news. You can listen to the segment below:
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the key to determining how well your website will rank organically in search engines. With SEO, your content is really the defining factor of how successful you will be.
This is why it is so important to focus on developing quality content for your business. Your content mainly consists of blog articles and web copy. If website copy isn’t your forte, hiring a copywriter to do an SEO write-up for your web pages is a smart idea. Quality content on your website will create a solid foundation for all of your other SEO efforts.
Not sure what goes into quality content? You need to be offering real value to your customers with content that is both useful and different from what they’ll find on other sites.
The best way to determine what you should be covering with your content is with keyword research. Keyword research is the process of discovering which relevant keywords to your business your potential customers are searching for so that you can utilize those in your own website content. What do people search for to research your industry? You want to use those search terms to produce content that will answer their search query.
For example, a local Charleston business might be looking for digital marketing help, but not know about The Modern Connection specifically. Instead, they’re going to do a google search for “marketing agencies in Charleston.” So instead of focusing only on ranking for our business name, we’re going to include keywords about how we’re a marketing agency in Charleston so that we will show up in their search results.
Once you’ve discovered the keywords that you want your website to rank for, you’ll use them on various web pages and in various blog posts on your site. There’s no perfect number of times to use each keyword (despite what you may have heard about “keyword density”). You just want to make sure the copy flows naturally and you aren’t stuffing keywords into every possible sentence. Google is smart, and it can tell when you do that, and it will put you in time out for punishment. (In other words, they will penalize your site and push you down in results.)
The next key step is to regularly produce new content. Updating your site regularly tells the search engines that your website should be up to date with all of the latest industry information, which pushes you higher in search results.
Plus, search engines just love fresh, new content. In fact, Google has what is called “Query Deserved Freshness” or QDF, which will help your website to rank higher if you’re utilizing a keyword that is suddenly getting searched for more often than before. What does this mean, strategically?
If you hear of a brand new buzzword in your industry, write a blog post about it immediately. Then, when it becomes popular and customers are searching for it, your website is more likely to rank higher for that search term.
Think about Vertical Search, also, or search queries for things other than articles. If you have other media on your website, you might rank in other special search pages, like Images, Videos, or News. Include your keyword in all of the alt tags for your images and apply for your business blog to be included in Google News.
Want SEO help? We can create SEO copy for your website as well as regularly update your business blog with the latest industry information. Call us at (888) 632-4499 or fill out our free consultation form to get started.
