5 BEST WAYS TO IMPROVE SALES USING SEO

Organic search should be a driving focus for most online enterprises because it is targeted. The users who visit the sites have a specific intent and if the site is able to provide that, there is a very high chance that they will convert, or become customers.

But this doesn’t come naturally. Site owners and marketers have to put in the effort to make attract the attention and interests of their target audience.

Below are the top five ways to do just that.

1. Make use of title tags

Most businesses with a dedicated website or online presence forget that one of the simplest ways to increase the traffic into their site is through page title tags. These are words that appear when you hover over the browser when you visit a site.

Title tags are typically displayed on search results pages as the headline that is clickable for a given result. Title tags are quite important for both SEO and social sharing. A site’s title tag is meant to convey an accurate and concise description of the content of the page.

If the title tag uses words like “Welcome” or “Home” then you’re not making full use of this key website element. The site is failing to tell search engines what your website is as well as the content inside.

Title tags should be optimized and descriptive because search engines like Google use them to collate results for user search queries. For example, if someone looks up “floral sundress,” the search engine will go through all pages that relate to floral sundresses. But if you use vague and nondescript words like “dress” or “welcome” as title tags, it is very unlikely that your website will even show up in the search results.

Google usually shows the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag. Keeping title tags under 60 characters will means the title will display properly. Anything longer and search engines will cut it off and add an ellipsis at the end.

As an added tip, try not to overdo it with SEO keywords in the title tags. Although search engines won’t penalize you for it, it could create a bad user experience when you’re overstuffing the title with a lot of keywords.

2. Content creation

When you have a burning question, the first thing most people do is turn to Google for the answers. Those links that appear on the search pages are all content. We are all consuming content whether we want to or not, that is just a given.

Content is what keeps us informed. It answers our questions. It entertains us. It evens guides our decisions. In the marketing sense, content is used to attract and engage customers, bring new visitors to a website, and ultimately generate revenue for the business.

It only makes sense for a business that wants to succeed to create valuable and worthwhile content.

Content creation is the act of creating topic ideas that appeal to a group of people, then creating visual or written content about those ideas and making it accessible to the target audience. Content creation can take the form of blogs, infographics, videos, and other formats.

Content creation, therefore, is important for inbound marketing for these reasons:

• It brings in 3 times as many leads compared to other traditional marketing tactics, and it costs less.
• SMBs that make use of content marketing get more leads, by up to 120% more than those that don’t.
• More than 50% of online purchases are directly related to people reading a blog

Businesses and brands that publish upwards of 15 blogs per month get 3 times more traffic than those that post five or fewer blog posts per month

Creating an efficient content plan and strategy should be at the core of every marketing strategy. It should include everything from how you promote the content to set the tone of the brand, to how you interact with your target audience.

3. Social media

You might be wondering how social media plays into a site’s SEO standing when both exist in a very different bubble. But in fact, the massive popularity of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the likes have not gone unnoticed by search engines like Google. Although social media doesn’t have a direct impact on rankings, they affect SEO optimization in different ways:

• social media increases traffic and visibility for the site
• increases brand recognition
• better content distribution
• helps with local SEO

Social signals such as likes, shares, reviews, or pins indicate that the brand or business is being talked about which only helps with the SEO efforts.

Increasing visibility

The main goal of any marketing efforts, when you get right down to it, is to increase leads and sales. The more people see what you have to offer, the more chance you have that they will convert or become customers.

If you’ve noticed recently, Google algorithms have started displaying search results that link to social media profiles. In some instances, if the brand or business has a Twitter account, it will showcase its most recent tweets. This proves that social media results really do show up on the search engine results page which means it’s boosting online visibility.

Increase brand recognition

Brand recognition is the ability of your audience, and the general public at large, to easily recognize your brand through signified such as logos, colors, and slogans. The best way to showcase this is through the brand’s social media profiles.

Content distribution

Facebook got over 1.6 billion daily visits in 2016. That’s a huge number of people and all of them are sharing and consuming content. This is a prime opportunity for you to put your content out there and get it circulating across fresh eyes. You don’t even have to keep posting new content. You can repurpose older ones and then sharing them.

Local SEO

Social media is your number one tool if you want to tap your local SEO. Businesses listing citations should be on all your site pages and the same could be said about your social media profiles. Include keywords in the descriptions, what your service is, your hours of operation, and how people can reach you.

You can also opt to embed social media feed on website to make your website more engaging. As there will be more engagement to the website, it is likely to reduce the bounce rate and increase the dwell time on the website. All these factors help you in increasing your overall SEO impact.

4. Digital PR

If you are becoming increasingly frustrated that your website is failing to rank higher for your keywords in the search results, you might benefit a great deal from leveraging Digital PR. This is an online marketing tactic that uses other businesses to increase their online presence. People in this line of work connect with journalists, influencers, and bloggers and send press releases in order to gain valuable and high-quality backlinks and mentions in social media in the hopes of improving their SEO.

A great example of this, and one that is slowly gaining traction, are those PR lists that many brands have where they have a list of people who will receive new products or services prior to its launch so they can create content about it when the product becomes available to the public. There’s a whole industry of content creators whose main business is about reviewing recently launched products and services.

For local businesses, the goal of their Digital PR should be getting their business featured in publications that write about the area. This could be local blogs by bloggers who live in the area or local newspaper sites. It could even be reviewed by local residents who have purchased or interacted with the business.

Digital PR differs from traditional PR in the sense that the latter focuses more on print-based publications, TV, and radio, whereas digital PR exists in online media channels. The growing online industries have pushed many firms and publicists to shift their focus on digital PR.

5. Technical SEO

And last on this list is technical SEO. This is an important step that a lot of sites forget, only to be remembered and corrected when they realized they’re not seeing the expected results.

Simply put, technical SEO refers to optimizing your site so crawling and indexing it is easier. With a properly implemented technical SEO, you help search engines access, crawl, and index your website with minimal problems.

The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the site’s infrastructure. This is why it is called “technical” because it has nothing to do with content or site promotion.

Here are the top 3 best practices of technical SEO:

Preferred Domain

Whether it’s a blog or a website, you have to specify your preferred domain. Doing so, you are instructing search engines the type of domain you will be using during the entire existence of your website.

URL Structure

This talks about the format of your URL. Best practices of URL structure include:

• use lower case characters only
• separate words within a URL using dash (-)
• short and descriptive
• avoid unnecessary words or characters

Navigation

Make sure your site is navigable and well-organized. This also plays into the user experience, which also affects page ranking.

Online retailers and brands have an overarching goal with their business and that is to increase their sales. Many employ the use of various techniques but for the most part, it is through organic search that many businesses find success.