How to Grow Your Business Through SEO and SEM
Search engine optimization is an essential part of growing your business. However, before you decide to work on your SEO efforts, it is important that you understand how search engine marketing functions. SEM is based on keywords, that is, search queries. In other words, before you dive into the process of gaining traffic from organic search results on search engines, what you are looking for are popular keywords. In this article, we are going to discuss the basics of growing your business through SEO and SEM.
Search engine marketing
The metrics that define the popularity of keywords are based on cost per click and monthly search volume. The latter is basically how many times a certain keyword is searched on a monthly basis. The former is defined by how much you pay according to how many times your ad is clicked on. No matter what your business is, it all comes down to keywords. Some keywords will bring you more traffic than others. What’s important to you is the conversion rate, or in other words, how many visitors are converted into customers. High search volume isn’t the most important aspect of a keyword. In fact, it is high conversion rate and a balanced search volume that matter. Once you have dealt with the basics of SEM, you can dive into the world of SEO.
On page optimization
Your first and foremost asset when it comes to SEO is your website. Therefore, you need to make the best out of it. The actions that are necessary to be taken in this case are called on page factors. There are three factors that are most important for your SEO efforts. These are:
- Inputting the focus keyword into a title, description, image alt tags and headers
- Making sure each important page has enough valuable content optimized for focus keywords
- Creating an SEO-friendly URL structure for every page
Titles, image alt tags, and descriptions
The first thing that Google checks on your page is how well your titles are optimized. This is why they need to include at least one focus keyword. The title is what Google uses for the ads that show up on search engine result pages. Basically, it tells both the user and search engines what your page is about.
Alt tags are essential parts of your images, because a search engine doesn’t know what it is about if you don’t assign content to it. If, for some reason, your image doesn’t show up, your image’s alt tag will show instead.
Meta descriptions tell visitors and search engines what your page is about. This is why they need to include keywords as well, next to enticing messages. If your description doesn’t come up as relevant to your content, Google will use snippets of its own choice instead.
Content
Quality content is about more than just throwing in keywords. What every search engine is looking for are relevant results for search queries. In order for your content to be seen as valuable and relevant, it needs to be unique and written in a way that it draws the user’s interest. If your content is uninteresting, Google will not consider your website worth the top ranking. Remember that you are competing against hundreds of websites for the same keyword.
SEO-friendly URL
A clear URL structure improves organic search presence, and it is another aspect of your SEO efforts that needs to include keywords. Next to making sure that you get a high ranking, a clean URL is easier to remember for your visitors.
Off page SEO
Good off-page SEO is based on backlinks and social media efforts. Backlinks are extremely important, and they have to be of high quality. What you are looking for are links from websites that have a high page ranking. The focus, of course, needs to be on getting them from websites that are related to your industry.
What every reputable SEO Company will tell you is engagement with your audience on social networks is also very important. Google understands how important social presence is for online marketing, and so should you. What you need to do is engage with and grow your audience on popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
In summation
SEO and SEM are essential parts of growing your business. Once you have established the steps discussed in this article, you can sit back and track your traffic and rank increase by using tools such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
