8 Advantages of SEO Techniques That Can Increase Traffic
SEO will be of massive importance in 2022 as digital transformation picks up its pace. Companies are now facing an urgent choice — to go digital or burst. Here are some digital transformation stats to help you realize the importance of SEO.
Digital Marketing Stats
- 70% of companies have either gone digital or while developing a strategy for it.
- 21% of companies think they have made their transition to the digital landscape.
- 40% of all technology spending has been channeled towards digitalization.
- Companies had spent a total of $2 trillion on digitalization.
All of this information makes you wonder, “what is digitalization?” And how does SEO fits into all of this? Here’s a brief recap of digitalization before we dive into the world of SEO and its advantages for your organization.
What Is Digitalization?
By definition, digitalization is the process of converting information into a digital format. Other sources illustrate digitalization as follows,
“Digitalization is the generic term for the Digital Transformation of society and the economy. It describes the transition from an industrial age characterized by analog technologies to an age of knowledge and creativity characterized by digital technologies and digital business innovation.”
However, it goes beyond converting data and transforming an economy and society.
It is a process in which an organization shifts from selling from a brick-and-mortar store to online stores with a website or an app. However, some businesses like to work in a physical store and through an online channel. These businesses are called Omni-channel, and their marketing budget is divided into digitalization and conventional marketing. Either for the sake of their customers or their business demands, Omni-channel businesses have a strong reason to work through a physical store and online.
How Does SEO Help in Digital Marketing?
Since digital marketing revolves around promoting your brand on Google and other online platforms, SEO plays an integral part in increasing your online visibility. Just like your conventional marketing tactics, where flyers, posters, and billboards help increase brand awareness, SEO also creates awareness and boosts your presence among online audiences.
If your company’s brick-and-mortar stores are popular, it doesn’t mean you will instantly be popular on the digital landscape. There might be other players who had heavily invested their time and money in SEO before you entered the market and dominated the top position in Google and other Search Engines. So, where does this leave you? – Start investing your efforts in digital marketing through SEO.
8 Advantages of SEO Techniques that Can Increase Your Traffic
Before you start using these SEO techniques for your business, you should check your website’s ranking on keywords. There are plenty of tools to do that, and once you have the data, put it on the side and start reading below.
1. Improve Your Sites User Experience
When doing SEO, you should know that it’s directly linked to search engines. You will have to meet their requirements to have your website ranked. Don’t panic! Search engines don’t want you to break mountains for them. Popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo want their users to find relevant results for their searches.
Moreover, Google prefers an optimized site over any other results, as it prefers to deliver highly relevant results to its users against their search query. Hence, you need to work on your website’s appearance. There are plenty of tools to optimize your website, and Google also has one for free.
Improving the user experience is not only good for Google but your business as well. Think about it, will you purchase from a sketchy website? User experience helps your website rank on top of Google search results by improving your site’s overall look.
Try using soft colors and smooth animations. Reducing your website’s load time will also improve its SEO ranking because Google will know that its users won’t spend much time waiting for results to load up.
2. Prepare Your Website for Voice Search
If you prioritize your SEO efforts this year, you might have some extra work on your hands. The world is changing faster than anticipated, and Artificial Intelligence is making things easier for users and harder for companies. With 25% of U.S adults owning a smart speaker, you can expect a surge in voice searches. This development has brought a shift in SEO practices, like stringing nouns together to form keywords.
However, this isn’t as bad as it seems. Since the key difference between manual search and voice search is the keyword’s size, you can start paying more attention to long-tail keywords. This innovation can flip the way Google Adwords has worked. Short-tail keywords were comparatively expensive than long-tail, but now, voice searches are slowly taking over. New businesses will have a hard time deciding where to invest their budget.
You can take a mix of both long and short-tail keywords to optimize your website and look for proper sentences when keyword hunting. If a keyword is a well-balanced sentence, there are high chances it’s from a voice search. Use that in your content to take over its market before your competitors realize its dormant significance.
3. Design for Mobile
Google is highly flexible to technological advancements, and it favors the most adapted changes. Google currently prefers to rank websites higher designed for smartphones because this is where most searches come from. No one bothers to open their laptop to do a quick search. Users have adapted to mobile devices for almost everything, from shopping to tracking their health, and they prefer making decisions at their fingertips.
According to Statista, there are 3 billion smartphone users in the world, and it’s expected to increase by 7 hundred million over the years. Placing your business in this growing market is the right decision because if you don’t do it now, you will regret it later. Getting your website’s mobile version isn’t much of a challenge, and any web and mobile development company can do it for you.
4. Use LSI Keywords
Google has updated its algorithm to help users find the right pages and scrutinize websites that offer a product or service; still, they don’t have relevant knowledge. Even if you are a champion in your industry, you will need LSI keywords to rank on Google. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Integration. These keywords are not directly related to the product or service you are offering, but they are important and subconsciously used in your content. For example:
The LSI keywords for a car website might be “Torque,” “Horsepower,” “Clutch,” and other parts of a car. Similarly, a website for Star Wars fans might have LSI keywords like “Droids” and other Star Wars characters or related information.
Designing your content around these LSI keywords can significantly boost your SEO rankings and help you score the top position faster than your competitors.
5. Write Longer Content
Writing longer content might seem tiring and make you wonder about whether anyone will read all these words, but these are wrong thoughts. SEO is a combination of various techniques to help your website rank on Google. One of which is backlinking.
Mentioning other websites in your content shows Google that your information comes from relevant sources. However, using too many expert backlinks can come under stuffing. Hence, longer content is more valued by Google than shorter.
Moreover, according to BacklinkO, longer keywords are more beneficial in ranking your website because your content seems well-researched to the user as well. Remember, when aiming to rank on Google, you are automatically targeting its users. So, following Google guidelines and tailoring your content according to them will make your website better for your target audience.
6. Take Advantage of YouTube
Google snippets mostly show videos for a search query if there are any uploaded on Google. Videos are easier to understand, and they share a lot of information in less time. Many SEO experts tend to forget about YouTube when ranking their website. Video marketing may not be for everyone, but taking advantage of this effective medium for your website is in everyone’s domain.
You can start by creating 3 minutes or longer video explaining your services and how you work. Put your website link in the description, and you will have a strong backlink. Moreover, when you start doing YouTube SEO and explain each segment of your video in the description, Google will snippet your video and automatically drag it to the point where the search query is answered.
7. Diversify Your Backlinks Portfolio
Keep in mind that strong backlinks are crucial for ranking your website on Google. If you don’t understand how backlinks can help, consider a scenario where you have to buy a particular item; would you buy from an unknown seller or a person your friend recommended? Whom will you trust more? The same approach applies to backlinks. When a high Domain Authority website mentions your link in their content, Google automatically assumes that your website is a credible authority. However, it depends on whether the backline was a “do-follow” or a “no-follow” link.
Do-follow links are those where the webmaster allows Google crawlers to visit the website they have linked. On the other hand, no-follow links are where the webmaster doesn’t allow Google to visit the link. These webmaster permissions determine your ranking because if Google can’t visit the website linked in the content, it won’t know who is behind the hyperlink.
Most businesses don’t offer do-follow links because it might jeopardize their ranking if your ranking falls. Still, some allow this condition. It all depends on your SEO strategy. You can either sponsor your website services with another web for a do-follow link or build good business terms for a free referral.
8. Never Over Look Technical SEO
Most SEO specialists are so focused on increasing their website’s authority by capturing outside links that they forget to pay attention to their own. Technical SEO helps in keeping your website free from bugs and other errors. A technical SEO team can resolve any issues that improve search engine ranking, but here are a few important factors you must keep in mind to help your website rank better.
- Make Sure All Pages are HTTPS
The difference between HTTPS and HTTP is that the latter is not secure. Moving to HTTPS from HTTP might be easier for you if your business is small and new, and making this shift is necessary for SEM and SEO.
- AMP for Mobile
Mobile websites are small, with many codes integrated to make them look better on all screen sizes. This issue might cause your mobile site to perform slow and be full of bugs. Updating to the Accelerated Mobile Page or AMP version of your mobile website is necessary for delivering an excellent user experience.
-
Enable Lazy Loading
Your website needs lazy loading to make it seem faster. Although it doesn’t reduce the size of any images, it stalls the image loading process and allows the picture in view to be loaded before the one hiding below the screen. It’s a great feature that will help users feel welcome on your site and let Google know you have done your homework.
The Bottom Line
SEO is the heart and soul of all digital marketing activities. Without a good SEO team, you can’t rank your website on Google. There are plenty of ways SEO can benefit your business and increase traffic on your website, but the ones mentioned above are crucial. If you are interested in learning more about SEO and digital marketing, keep following my blog posts.
