Responsive Website Design: The Path to Success for You E-Commerce Brand
September 5, 2022Proactive Technology Support
January 10, 2023Improving the Credibility of Your Website & Creating an SEO-Friendly Website
Are you planning a digital marketing strategy for your business? If yes, then you would’ve heard the term SEO marketing being tossed around quite a few times. SEO or search engine optimization defines how a search engine like Google views your website.
So, if you want to turn your business wagon around on the path to success, then it’s time to dig deeper into the world of SEO. In this article, we’ll be covering the importance of SEO for a website and the vital components of an SEO-friendly website. Take a look!
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization determines your online visibility. So, if you want to expand your online presence to serve a wider target audience base with your products and services, then you need a robust SEO strategy.
Search Engine Optimization can be defined as the process of improving the quantity and quality of the traffic on your website from the search engine results pages.
Do you know how many website spots are there on a Google Search Engine Results Page? Yup, you guessed it right. It’s 10. Your SEO marketing strategy decides where you will stand in this lineup.
Let’s imagine that a prospective customer of your business visits Google and types a keyword that’s relevant to the goods and services that you provide. But, what if your website is on the second or even the fifth page of Google SERP? Do you think that the customer will visit it? Chances are, they won’t.
Your rank on Google Search Engine Results Pages runs hand in hand with the number of people that will view your website. The better your Google SERP rank, the more website traction you generate, and the more money your business makes.
Now that you’ve understood what search engine optimization is, let’s take a look at what search engine optimization can do for your business.
Why Does Your Business Need Search Engine Optimization?
From restaurant recommendations to shopping for goods and services, customers can now do it all at just the click of a button. If you want your target audience to come straight to your website in your industrial niche, then you must update your website as per the latest search engine optimization guidelines. To convince you more of the power of SEO, here are the critical reasons:
1. Build Your Business
Optimizing your website as per the latest SEO standards helps to understand the nit and grit of what your target audience expects from you. To rank at the top of Google SERPs, you need to create website content that aligns with the needs and wants of your target audience.
If you bear this point in mind while building your website, it can help you select the most appropriate keywords and website content. This will help your online presence to reflect the original story behind your brand and establish a trustworthy relationship with the target audience.
2. Improve Traction to Your Website
The number of people that visit your website is directly proportional to the money you end up making. A huge part of the performance of your website is determined by organic search. Search engines play a huge role in deciding the online presence of your website.
Furthermore, out of all the search engines available such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Google holds the major market share. If you rank better on Google SERPs, it means that you are a trusted source of information. This will help attract more users to your website in the long run.
3. Understand the Consumer Voice
Right from the granular details of customer search intent to the market shifts, search engine optimization tells you everything that you need to know to understand your customers. It provides key insights into the behavior and the signals of your target customer audience. Search engine results page analysis, query data, and AI insights are useful to gather vital information about customer behavior and statistics.
4. Build a Trustworthy Brand
The goal of an SEO marketing strategy is to build a trustworthy and credible brand image in the market. This will help not only improve the customer experience but also help you to scale your business exponentially. The only way to do this is to establish yourself as an authority in your industrial niche on Google.
Your authority is validated by positive user behavior, natural links, SEO on-page, and off-page elements, etc. The E-A-T guidelines provided by Google can help you formulate a long-term SEO plan with promising results. However, it is important to remember that it takes time, effort, and consistency to see the SEO results that you envision.
5. Enhance Your Website Conversion Rate
Website conversion rate can be defined as the percentage of your website visitors that end up purchasing your products and services and becoming loyal paying customers. To improve your website conversion rate, you must venture into local search engine optimization.
This helps market your brand to the customers that are looking for a service like yours in their vicinity. Local SEO helps people locate your brand quickly and focuses on local neighborhoods, cities, and regions to amplify your brand’s voice on a local level.
6. Constant Website Updates
The SEO landscape is ever-changing and therefore, to ensure that your SEO strategy continues to bear fruit, you need to constantly conduct the SEO audit of your website.
To pick up the pace with the constantly evolving world of search engines, you need to read up on the latest SEO updates thoroughly and incorporate them into your website to stay at the top of your game!
7. Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
One of the best parts about search engine optimization is that it helps you to market your brand to the world without burning a hole in your pocket. Not only is optimizing your website as per the latest SEO norms cheap but also pays you back a good return on your investment if implemented correctly.
How to Build an SEO-Friendly Website?
In today’s technologically advanced world, the importance of search engine optimization for an e-commerce brand cannot be undermined. Given below is a detailed stepwise guide that will help you create the ultimate SEO-friendly website and make your mark in the e-commerce industry.
1. Decide Upon a Solid URL Name
If you’re thinking of launching your website entry soon, then a great place, to begin with, is deciding upon a solid URL name. The first step towards search engine optimization begins right from the domain name of your business. Therefore, it is important to introduce some elements of SEO into it.
For example, you can introduce your primary keyword into the URL for improved SERP ranking. This will also help the users to understand what your website is with just one quick look at the URL.
2. Pick a Web Hosting
Let’s be honest. Nobody likes to wait for hours for a website to load. With the majority of potential customers using their smartphones to search for goods and services, you must build a website with an intuitive and quick loading interface. This can be done by choosing an excellent website hosting.
Back in the day, an SSL security certificate was mandatory only for websites that stored valuable customer information and had payment gateways. However, today every website no matter its purpose is expected to carry an SSL security certificate. The idea behind this is that an HTTPS-certified website helps instill a sense of security amongst users.
3. Choose a Great Content Management System
Most small business users prefer to use WordPress as their content management system. However, before you get swayed by WordPress reviews, it is important to conduct your in-depth research and find out which content management system works the best for you. Look for a content management system that is optimized to serve even the most basic SEO requirements.
4. Appropriate Indexing
This is an area wherein you index the various pages on your website so that they can be found easily by search engine crawlers. Therefore, you have to ensure that the search engine crawlers can understand every nook and corner of your website.
To do this, it is recommended that you can create an SEO-friendly XML Site map, or click on the “Request Indexing” function on Google Console. Since this step is a bit technical, it is recommended that you hire an SEO Expert to execute this step to perfection.
5. Create SEO-Friendly Website Architecture
Website architecture is a broad term that covers everything related to your website from its pages to website navigation systems. The aim of creating an SEO-friendly website architecture is to ensure that your potential visitors can easily find the information that they’re looking for on your website. It also helps ensure that the search engine crawlers can skim through your content quickly with zero hindrances.
● First, you need to pay attention to the URL of your website. The URL needs to be short and includes a primary keyword to improve your SERP rankings.
● Next, it’s time to create an SEO-friendly sitemap to make it easier for search engine crawlers to locate your website.
● Internal linking to the anchor texts in your content is another key strategy for improving the architecture of your website. These internal links don’t just help users to understand the anchor text but also find out what’s on the other side of the internal link.
For example, when you link the anchor text in your content to appropriate internal web pages it saves users their time and effort by eliminating the need to scroll up and down the web page again and again.
● If you don’t want to spoil the user experience of your customers with a website that has a ton of bloatware, then it is best to avoid too much JavaScript coding. Not just this it can also mess up the mobile responsiveness of your website.
6. Excellent Content Marketing
Your content forms a communication channel between you and your customers. It is a powerful marketing tool that can help convince your potential customers about the effectiveness of your products and services. Here are a few tips that can help you ace content marketing:
● Focus on the language of your target audience. This will help you to target the appropriate keywords in your content.
● Keywords form the stepping stone of an SEO-optimized content piece. Therefore, in-depth keyword research is important to rank better on Google SERPs.
● However, excess of anything is bad and this takes us to the point of keyword stuffing. Ideally, keywords should only comprise about 1-2% of your potential length.
● Backlinking your content to authoritative websites helps confirm that you’ve done your thorough research.
7. Technical Aspects
On-page SEO consists of several technical aspects that must be taken care of. These include:
● Include HTML title tags of at least 50-60 characters and optimize them as per your primary keyword.
● Include a meta Description of up to 160 characters to give your audience a gist of what your website content is about.
● Place all the headers in your content in a hierarchical manner based on their level of importance. For example, the title of the content should be in the H1 tag.
● Image optimization through Alt tags is another key SEO strategy that helps expand your audience reach.
● Lastly, it is important to link your website content to your social media accounts and provide a relevant CTA (Call to Action) for the same.
Conclusion
If you want to run a successful digital marketing campaign, then investing in a robust SEO strategy should be on the rim of your bucket. The key here is to keep the ultimate user experience as your goal and utilize the latest SEO strategies to optimize your website.
Since the designing efforts and decisions that you take determine the outcome of your SEO strategy, it is best to hire a professional SEO expert to help your business reach new horizons.