The success of any business often depends on its ability to generate leads and to convert those leads into sales. In the contemporary global market, the internet allows you to sell to anyone, anywhere, at any time, which is why having a strong digital presence is crucial to your business success. In 2018, E-commerce accounted for $2.86 trillion in global sales, and that number is expected to increase to $4.88 trillion by 2021. If you want your business to get a piece of those sales, then it’s crucial to have an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place. Below are some useful tips to help you construct and employ an effective SEO strategy.

Keyword Research

Imagine yourself on Google searching for a product or service. What words or phrases are you using to search for what your looking for? These words are known as keywords and they are the foundation of your SEO strategy, since they’ll help people find you. For example, if your business specializes in selling tailored suits, then an obvious key word/phrase to use would be “tailored suits” or “custom tailored suits”. Through research, it’ll up to you to determine all the keywords and phrases relevant to your business or service. After doing your keyword research and choosing which words to use, the next step is to implement those keywords throughout your content, web pages, URL’s, headings, alt tags, metadata, and page titles. It is important to strategically place these words throughout your content but make sure you are not flooding the page.

Create Captivating Content

Your content acts as a vehicle for your keywords, driving them to your target audience in hopes of making conversions. Your content should be something valuable you can offer to customers, and it should be shareable so you can reach new audiences. Your content should answer all your customers questions, provide important information, and help facilitate a purchasing decision. If your content is captivating enough and contains your keywords, you now have a chance to turn your leads into conversions.

Great content comes in many forms and you should be using a variety of them to get your message across. These include blogs, videos, high quality images, infographics, podcasts, animations, user-generated content, FAQ’s, products reviews etc.

Use Social Media

Social media is one of the fastest growing elements of an effective SEO strategy, due to an increasing number of consumers turning to these platforms to engage with brands. Nearly 80% of people turn to Facebook or Instagram when they want to find interesting content, and this means there’s a huge opportunity there for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, gain feedback, and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Responsive and Local

With more and more people interacting on mobile phones than ever before, there is now an emphasis on having websites that are mobile-friendly. Local SEO is also becoming increasingly important as more consumers use smart phones to search for businesses because 30% of all mobile searches performed today have a local intent. Additionally, over 70% of people will visit a nearby business after conducting a local search, so if you want to drive traffic to your physical or E-commerce store, then you must focus on local content (including local keywords and landing pages), and you must make sure your digital presence is entirely responsive.

On-page SEO

There are many reasons why on-page SEO is vital to your success. For starters, on-page SEO makes your site more user-friendly, makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, will increase your search ranking, and will help you focus on optimizing essential elements like visuals. If you’re not familiar with on-page SEO, here are some of the most important steps involved:

• Creating unique and descriptive title tags
• Increasing your page load speed to reduce bounce rates
• Writing descriptive and keyword-optimized alt text for the images on your site
• Optimizing headings with keywords and relevant descriptions
• Linking site content with internal links to improve navigation and indexing
• Using sensible and easy-to-read URLs
• Writing meta descriptions to improve visibility on a search engine results

Creating and maintaining an effective strategy that prioritizes all these elements is just as important as the elements themselves because that’s the best way to ensure you build an effective SEO strategy that will help your business increase sales. To learn more about SEO, or if you have any further questions contact Virtual Image in Hamilton today!