With more than 1 billion websites hustling to grab new customers online, more brands are getting lost in oblivion after wasting so much effort, time and money. And your brand might just face the same fate if you don’t figure out ways to increase sales with SEO, regardless of your location.
Yes! Search engine optimization is one of the most cost friendly and reliable sources of traffic for businesses. As an entrepreneur, you have to find ways to hack SEO; gather new customers and make actual sales, if you’re planning to survive the next few years.
As a brand that’s worked with a number of firms, I can assure you, building a robust visibility in the light of increased competition, search algorithm fluctuations and spiraling economy can be tough.
Yet, a few businesses have braced the odds to find a way and stay afloat, in the midst of all the noise. And in this guide, I’ll be sharing with you some of the secret tips that worked for these businesses and how you can apply them to your own business.
Find your Goal
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As a brand, your priority is to know exactly what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and what you expect to achieve from taking some specific actions. That’s why you need to find your goals. It is one of the most important steps you can take to increase sales with SEO.
Find out, what exactly you plan to achieve within a specific timeline (say quarterly, half yearly or yearly, whatever works for you).
The next thing is to find out why achieving this goal (or goals) is important to you? Be sure to outline the difference it’ll make if you achieve it and what will happen if you don’t.
It is very crucial for you to find out your goals because the moment you do that, it becomes easier to create a plan and align your strategies in a way that can lead to the fulfillment of your expected outcomes.
Evaluate your Outcomes
Now, one of the most important steps you have to take in your journey to increase sales with SEO is to evaluate your current results.
If you’re just starting out, you can ignore this part. But, if you’re already an existing business, at this point, you want to identify clearly the results you’ve achieved so far.
Identify what worked for you, what didn’t work for you within the period under review. Find out patterns led to each of the outcomes you’re having and how these patterns influenced your overall performance.
The goal of doing this is to give you an insight into what you need to avoid, the things you need to improve on and how you can reposition your business to drive even more productive results.
Done well, evaluating your outcomes can provide in-depth insights that will lead to a more robust improvement on your future results.
Identify Target Growth Areas
Since you already know where you performed optimally, where you’re lagging behind and areas you need to improve on, to further increase sales with SEO you need to identify your target growth areas.
So, target growth areas are those aspects of your business you want to improve on. They are the specific business areas you need more visibility on your website, more customers and actual sales.
Based on the businesses I’ve worked with, I’ve come to realize that sometimes, a business does not need an overall improvement in all areas at the same time.
There are instances where you need to have focused growth target in specific areas at different intervals. This may be due to available resources, overall business goals or other situations.
Whatever it is for you, find out your key growth areas. Figure out how growth in these areas will affect your business and the respective aspect of it.
After you’ve done this successfully, go ahead, choose and get started only with the most important growth area that is realistic, fits in with your current goals and is crucial to your business growth at the time being.
Pick Out Keywords
Keywords are essential part of search engine optimization that cannot be ignored.
To increase sales with SEO, you will need to use the right keywords on your website and digital platforms. And to do this correctly, you have to identify the key words, search phrases and terms that are relevant to both your audience and your business.
Start with checking out your growth areas. And then head over to your offerings, be it services or products. And then find out the relevant keywords that will cover all of these.
Alongside a general keyword, you will need specific keywords for individual pages, articles and sections of your website.
All of this is to encourage these individual segments to rank accordingly, and deliver on their own individual outcomes.
So, what this means is that based on your offerings, you may need to have a list of keywords. For example, you can chunk it down to overall keywords targeted at your business, niche, sub keywords aimed at your different services or products and of course specific keywords targeted at pages, trends, competition, etc.
Optimize your Website
What most new business entrepreneurs do not understand quite frankly is the fact that it is not possible to increase sales with SEO if your website is not well optimized for search engine visibility.
So what this means is that as a business, getting a website does not always mean that you will get visibility or even make sales from that website.
To make sales online, you have to take steps to optimize your website for visibility, using the keywords, relevant to your brand and target audience.
Starting with your meta titles, meta description, keyword usage, technical SEO etc., you have to take steps to make sure your website is optimized to deliver on your expected outcomes.
And even where you have it all optimized, one key thing you have to keep doing is to go back to ensure your optimization is still delivering on expected outcomes at intervals.
Create & Optimize Content
Content is the cornerstone of search engine optimization. It is the most important factor that will lead you to build keyword optimization, boost natural back links, build brand thought leadership etc.
As a brand that plans to increase sales with SEO, you need to have in place, a solid content marketing plan that will get you to create and publish outstanding content on your website at specific intervals.
That said, to increase online sales with content marketing, you need to first of all, know your target audience and then go ahead to understand the kind of content that matters to your audience.
As soon as this is done, go ahead and research on that kind of content and then create it in a way that is better than what anyone else in that niche is doing.
Beyond that, make your content to be appealing and also ensure that it satisfactorily addresses the needs of your target audience.
Add value to your content. Do not focus on selling and promoting your brand, give out a resourceful information that provides a solution to the need of your content consumers and you’ll have them promote and share your content.
Build your Backlink Profile
Backlinks are important indicators of a web page’s authenticity, popularity and reliability. They are one of the most important indicators, used by the search engines in ranking a website’s relevance.
Naturally, with good content, you can get to attract backlinks to your website without any effort from your part. But with increasing competition these days, it is becoming difficult for small business websites to build natural backlinks.
To increase sales with SEO in spite of this, work on publishing high value content. Beyond that, take steps to promote your content beyond your website and social media circles.
In addition, consider leveraging on guest posting, featured partnerships and collaboration with other websites to garner as much quality backlinks as possible.
PS: While scouting for backlinks, focus on building links from quality and relevant websites only.
Boost your Local SEO
Local SEO is an important search engine optimization strategy that’s actually helped a number of businesses to build growth. And it is an important strategy you want to consider if you really plan to increase sales with SEO.
I know most businesses I speak with are oftentimes more interested in international SEO because the deem they don’t want to be limited to the local market.
That’s a great thing to do from a marketing a business point of view but when it comes to realistic SEO strategies, this kind of positioning will not lead to as much results as you’d get if you were to start out with local SEO.
In essence, local SEO gives businesses the chance to get local visibility that will lead to actual sales and growth. You can leverage this to build your reputation, get reviews and improve your digital footprints before aiming higher for international SEO.
And yes, you can take both local and international SEO in stages. Build from one and then head onto the next.
Invest in Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a great tool that can actually boost your chances to increase sales with SEO, regardless of whatever strategies you are using.
Outside its own unique visibility and sales generation opportunity, linking your website with the social media helps in building your KLT factors.
And it also serves in indexing, helping to get your data properly aligned in search results.
Additionally, the search engine can boost visibility for your website. You can get to share your blog posts and other content on your social media handles, getting the chance to attract readers over to your website.
Leveraging social media marketing also gives you the chance to drive engagement on your platform, grow visibility and overall, build backlinks to the post.
All of these are ranking indicators that can be used by the search engine in gauging the relevance of a web page.
Final Words
It is inarguable. A lot of businesses in faraway countries in Africa, Asia, and South America etc. have already leveraged digital marketing and search engine optimization in particular to drive growth and thrive, regardless of their location.
There are key examples of these businesses out there. And there are data to demonstrate this. But what is arguable is whether you’re going to use this guide to unleash the next phase of growth for your own business.
While I to bring this guide to conclusion, I make bold to say that deciding to boost your business sales with SEO is your decision alone to make. And you can get started with SEO experts by reaching us here.
Now, it’s your turn. What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to improving your website SEO? Drop your comments below.
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