Build A Strong SEO Strategy to Grow Your Business

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Steps For Developing A Working SEO Strategy

If you have a website, search engine optimization is something that you cannot afford to ignore. It is the process of manipulating a website to achieve desirable search engine rankings by using a good SEO strategy. It plays a very crucial role in the success of both online and brick and mortar businesses. Developing a good strategy can be quite challenging especially if you do not have a lot of knowledge and experience in search engine optimization. To help you come up with a working strategy quickly, here are some of the things that you can do.

1. Set Objectives

The apparent purpose of SEO is ranking well in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other popular search engines to drive traffic to your website. However, that is not going to mean anything if your site does not appear in the front of people that do not seem to care too much about the products and services that you are offering. One of the most important things you need to do if you want to come up with a successful SEO plan is to determine who your target audience is and learn as much as you can about them. You need to know their search patterns, demographics, geographic location, and preferences and so on. The best way to do this is by opening a Google Analytics account.

After knowing who your target audience is, you can go ahead and set objectives based on them. To do that, you will need to make sure that your understand what it is you want those people to do on your website, the best that way the people can use to get on your site, and so on. If you do not have clear objectives, you may end up doing a lot of work without getting any meaningful results.

2. Perform Keyword Research

The keywords that you will use on your website can either make or break your SEO strategy, so you need to select the keywords to target carefully. Come up with a list of about ten keywords that are associated with the products and services that you are offering. After that, use the Google Keywords tool to come up with variations that make good sense for your business. Come up with as many variations as possible and then use search volume and competition to narrow down the list to about ten keywords that you would like to rank for. List the keywords in order of relevance or priority to your business.

3. Build Keyword-Focused Webpages

To have a successful SEO strategy, you need to make sure that you have a website with multiple pages that are tailored to specific phrases or keywords. Stuffing a lot of keywords on one page with the hopes that it will rank higher in the search engines can be next to impossible. Using the keyword list that you made in step 2, determine how many pages your website should have – make sure that the number of pages coincides with the different productions, locations, and offerings that your business has.

4. Take Advantage of Off-Page SEO

Links are among the important factors that determine how search engines rank websites. For that reason, you need to craft a proper link building plan around the different tactics you will employ in your SEO strategy to attract inbound links to your website. Try to earn the links naturally as much as possible. You can do this by making connections with your target audience or people in your industry. Other great methods that you can use to earn natural links include creating good content, outreach to websites that qualify as an authority in your industry, and requesting links from affiliates.

5. Track Your Data and Results

Monitoring and tracking your data and results will help you know what is working and what is not. You need to get a system in place for this as soon as you can if you want your SEO strategy to work. Some of the things you can do include setting up a Google Analytics account for monitoring traffic on a daily or weekly basis, creating a spreadsheet to track changes, and using rank tracking service to monitor search positions over time.

All in all, search engine optimization is an ongoing process. You cannot expect to start it today and see great results tomorrow. However, when you have a great SEO strategy, it can translate into online success of your business for many years to come.

The Optimum Times to Post on Facebook

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The Optimum Times to Post on FacebookIf you run a business, be it online or offline you know that advertising is key to getting your brand established.  There is no shortage of place to advertise your business and most of them want your hard earned cash.  If your business is new or you simply don’t have the budget, there are still places where you can get your business advertised for free.

One of the best places to build your brand is still on Facebook.  Yes, the Facebook algorithm has changed and it’s harder now to expand your organic reach but not impossible.  Facebook can drastically boost the amount of traffic that goes to your website, but posting whenever is not the formula for success.  That being said when is it better to post?  Weekends when everyone is at home or during the week after dinner when people are just kicking back and surfing the net?  Do you know the best time to post on Facebook, for that matter, were you even aware that sometimes are better than others to increase your reach.  Here are the optimum times to post on Facebook.

Research has Been Done

Everybody and their marketing dog has done research on when the best time to post to your Facebook page, by everybody that includes Huffington Post, Quicksprout, and Fast Company.  They have all done research on social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest just to name a few.  For simplicity, we’ll start with Facebook since it is the oldest and most used social network.  Each social network has their own ideal time to post since the audiences can be very different.  This is just one of the reasons to work with a digital marketing agency to help with social campaigns.

The Optimum Times to Post on Facebook

People login to Facebook from absolutely everywhere, mobile, tablet and desktops and they are doing it from home, at work, and on the go.  According to one study between 8 am and 8 pm is the worst time to post content.  The best time to post your content is on Wednesday afternoons at 3 pm.  However, your engagement will be better on Thursdays and Fridays with engagement increasing as much as 20%.  And yes, the weekends are good too, post between 12-1 on both Saturdays and Sundays.  Here is a video outlining when you should schedule your posts.

These results were put together from data collected from a variety of companies and your results may be different.  You can use services like HootSuite and schedule your posts for all of these “ideal” times and see what has the best engagement.  It will give you a starting point for what works with your audience.

How to Avoid Bad SEO Companies

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How to Avoid Bad SEO Companies

As a small business owner you are probably inundated with phone calls every day from companies offering you SEO services, unfortunately most of them will do your business more harm than good.  Bad SEO may not sound like it’s that bad but in reality it can cost you thousands of dollars.  First in money wasted paying a company who doesn’t understand how SEO works and lastly by the revenue you can potentially lose if Google decides to de-index your site.

Here is how to avoid bad SEO companies:

If they promise you the same amount of backlinks every month

Building links is one of the things a good SEO agency is supposed to do, and building the same amount every month isn’t always a red flag.  However the exact same links every month can mean they are using an automated link building tool and that is a big no-no.  The best links are relevant to your business and send you traffic to your website.  Here is an example; putting a link on an industry newsletter is relevant to you.  Getting good links is hard work and getting the same amount month after month is impossible without building some spammy links.  That, you do not want.

Guaranteed Rankings

No digital marketing agency can guarantee you a first page ranking, especially within a specific time frame there are simply too many factors involved.  While there are black hat techniques that can get you to the first page, you won’t be there long and you’ll probably never see it again either.  Some shady SEO companies promise to rank you for x number of keywords, the problem is they aren’t keywords with many searches or relevance to your business.

A good agency is pretty good at showing you how they will increase your rankings and the milestones you can expect.  They will send you monthly reports that include not only your position but the search volume as well.

Guaranteeing a Specific Amount of Traffic

While you ultimately want to increase the numbers of visitors to your site, you also want visitors that are interested in your products and services.  However quality traffic that converts doesn’t happen easily, it takes time and effort.  Traffic is another metric that varies with competition and search volume.  Here is an example a small town plumber isn’t going to get 10,000 new visitors per month.  Even with all the planets lining up in your favor there just simply isn’t that many people searching for a plumber every month.

There are a lot of unscrupulous SEO agencies out there but there are some that are very good at their job and they work hard to get you what you need from your website.