Isn’t it exciting to build a new website? Choose the colors, design your logo, make the home page look Just fine. I totally get why entrepreneurs get caught up in the look of their website – that’s the fun part!
The problem is that the look of your website is only half the battle. And to be honest, it’s not even the most important half. Looking good is great, but acting good It should be your ultimate goal for your website.
To perform well, you need a website content strategy that actually reaches, engages, and converts potential customers.
To do this, you need to use good search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the process of attracting free, organic traffic from search engines like Google. Ultimately, you can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if search engines can’t find it, potential customers never will.
Get SEO right, and you’ll have a steady stream of high-quality traffic to your website. Get it wrong and people won’t even know you exist.
It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of good SEO. Fortunately, as complicated as it sounds, you can actually use SEO as a guide to help create a website content strategy that will improve your website and drive more business.
In the following article, we’ll explore how you can harness the power of SEO to create a website for your target market. Let’s jump.
SEO and content strategy for your website
Small business owners tend to wear a lot of hats. They have big dreams and many goals. While that can be great for their business, it can make it difficult for them to narrow down their unique selling position.
Many of the small business owners I work with struggle to sum up their business in a few simple key phrases. But Internet users are a fickle lot. You need to grab their attention within 3 seconds of landing on your website (literally), or you risk being bounced off your page and never seen again.
Any good website content strategy, then, will be based on short and concise titles, especially on the home page.
How does SEO help you write the best headlines possible? It is easy! Kind of. It’s easy if you understand how to do keyword research.
To do good keyword research, you must first inventory your own website using Google Analytics. What keywords bring people to your site? Which pages on your website drive conversions? Where do the people come from?
Next, take a look at your competition to get an idea of the competitive landscape for keywords. Who appears on Google when you search for your services or products?
After understanding this information, make a list of long tail keywords. Think in phrases instead of single word searches. Unless you have a ginormous budget (and even then), you probably won’t get a good ranking for something as generic as “dogs,” for example. But maybe you’ll have a go with ‘dogs have ticklish paws’. You get the idea.
Getting a good keyword list should be your first priority when building your website because it will inform the rest of your website’s content strategy. Then when you’re writing titles, especially on the home page, you can use your keywords to help focus your content.
So let’s say you’ve identified ‘small dog breeders in Abbotsford, BC’ as your long-tail keyword. Boom! There is your short and concise headline.
This is why you should think of SEO as more than just a more troublesome thing to do. When used correctly, it can be one of your most important tools in helping you develop a smart website for your target audience.
READ: How to use blogs to increase engagement
No matter what type of small business you have, writing blog articles is extremely important for a number of reasons. It is a key ingredient in your marketing strategy to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Today, there are more than 600 million blogs, from more than 1.7 billion websites. Here are some of the benefits of blogging for marketing and the components of an effective blog post so you can join them!
Read more on our website.
Use SEO to build your website for your target market
Let’s say you’ve done your research to develop a solid list of high-volume, low-competition keywords that will help you dominate the local search rankings.
And let’s assume you’ve done all the essentials of SEO, like using proper title tags, using proper H1 and H2 tags, and optimizing for Google’s top web vitals and local search traffic.
That’s it, right? Is that all you need for an SEO website?
Wrong. This is because search engines are always looking for new and relevant content. They’re always hungry for new content, and if you want to rank, it’s your job to feed them regular, quality content.
That’s why adding fresh content to a website, especially as a value-added blog post, is essential for all websites. By writing a blog, you are cheaply creating new content for search engines to index.
Not only that, your blog is a great way to showcase your expertise and/or products, prove your authority in your field, and connect with your audience on a regular basis.
Again, I understand why many of the small business owners who come to me have had trouble coming up with blog ideas.
And again, this is where your SEO strategy can help inform your website content, because that entire list of high-volume, low-competition keywords can also be your blog topic list!
Google will reward you if you use your blog to share original, substantive, and/or insightful information or analysis. Combine that search engine optimized content with a great keyword list, and you’ve got yourself a match made in digital marketers heaven.
Of course, I understand that building that keyword list is easier said than done when you’re not an SEO expert. Fortunately, it’s an easy task to outsource! My team regularly helps small business owners get more traffic with a sustainable SEO strategy. And we are constantly updating our strategies to meet the increasingly demanding changes from the major search engines.
We may be a bit of a nerd, but where others find SEO daunting and tedious, we love the challenge! Whatever your SEO needs, we have an SEO package to suit and can help you see real results.
For the success of your business,
Suzanne
