Category: Search Engine Optimization

Are you a business owner and tired of trying to attract visitors for your website?

OR

Are you an aspiring digital marketing professional, trying to learn the nitty-gritty of generating traffic and leads for a website?

In either cases, the first and foremost thing that you need to learn is how to generate organic traffic. Now, what does organic traffic imply? Well, to put it simply, when people search for something online and come across your website through the search engine, it is termed as organic traffic. 

So, the next question in your mind must be ‘how do I do it?’ Simple, design your website and make it live. Easy peasy. Right? WRONG. 

There are various factors that affect organic traffic and whether you’re a business owner or a digital marketing professional, you need to be aware of these factors to drive healthy organic traffic. 

This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes to the picture. In a nutshell, SEO can be defined as a set of techniques to boost your website’s ranking in the search engine result pages (SERP). Sounds a bit ambiguous. Isn’t it?

Don’t worry, in this blog, we will walk through the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and find out why it is important. Let’s explore. 

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization or SEO refers to a set of rules to optimize your website in a way that appears in the top results of a search engine query. For example, if a user searches for ‘how to lose weight?’ on Google and your website comes up as the best suggestion for the query, congratulations you have used SEO effectively. 

SEO is one of the most effective ways to enhance the quality of website and make it easier for the user to navigate. Besides, using a meticulous SEO will result in organic traffic, which comes free of cost. 

Agreed, paid advertisements do ramp up the number of visitors on your website, however, per many statistics, it is observed that most of the website traffic comes via search engine queries and to get hold of such users, you need to effectively use SEO techniques. 

In order to master the SEO game, you need to be aware of the various algorithms and algorithm changes that search engine uses to rank a website along with other factors such as content optimization and keywords among others.  

Why is SEO important for your website?

As stated earlier, most of the website traffic comes via search engine queries, which makes SEO the most effective technique to drive traffic. In fact, statistics show that 93 percent of all online interaction starts with search engines. Now, this makes Google one of the most sought after avenues as it holds almost 70 percent of search engine market share. 

Therefore, it is extremely crucial to develop an effective SEO strategy that conforms to Google’s algorithm. Not only will this pave the way for more traffic but also will augment the credibility of your website. 

Besides, having an optimized website that ranks in the top positions of Google search pages is responsible for smooth running of your website, which is essential to stay ahead of competitors. 

How? – Imagine you have created a website to sell homemade pickle and there are many other websites that do the same. Now, you have optimized your website and it ranks higher than others in the Google search pages. Who do you think is going to attract the customers? I think you get the idea.

Now, I believe you have a fair idea how SEO works and why is it so important for a website. Let’s move on and dig deeper. 

What are the types of SEO and how to use them?

Search engine optimization is an ever-dynamic playfield and to master this art, you will have to stay on top of the latest trends, consumer behavior, google algorithm changes and many more. 

In order to simplify this complex entity, SEO is categorized into three types: 

1. Technical SEO
2. On-page SEO
3. Off-page SEO

Don’t get overwhelmed by the terminology. We will cover each one of them and after you get acquainted, you would certainly breath a sigh of relief. So let’s begin. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the first leg of the entire SEO process. As the name suggests, this has no relation with the actual content of the website or the various methods used for website promotion. Instead, technical SEO deals with various settings, codes, and other configurations needed to make the job of search engine crawler easier. 

Well, you may now ask what now is a crawler. To give you a brief idea a search engine crawler is a robot that finds relevant content and keeps them in a huge database, from where information is divulged on request (online searches). 

Usually, once the technical SEO is configured, you don’t have to worry about again. It is not dynamic compared to the other types. 

On-page SEO

Marking the second stage of the SEO process, on-page SEO deals with everything related to content and other elements of the website. Unlike technical SEO, the key role of on-page optimization is to make the search engine crawler understand the meaning and context of your website content. 

In this stage, you will have to deal with content optimization, SEO keywords, website structure, title optimization, headings, structured data makeup and other techniques so that your website content is picked up by the crawler. 

Off-page SEO

The last and the final leg of the SEO process is off-page SEO. In this stage, you will deal with all kinds of ways to augment website traffic, which is beyond the website itself. 

Off-page SEO refers to all the techniques used to promote the website besides content optimization and search engine ranking. This includes paid promotion, social media promotion, backlinks, and others. 

How much does SEO cost?

Uptill now, you must have gained insights into the world of SEO and how it works, now it’s time to answer the big question – how much does SEO cost? 

While this question looks relevant to business owners only, even working professionals and aspiring digital marketing managers too need to ponder over this. 

To provide a straight answer to this much asked question is very difficult. It is extremely important to understand that the cost of SEO services is dependent on a variety of factors such as size of website, target location, budget, and others. 

It would be fair to evaluate the cost of SEO service on the basis of individual project and come up with a price matrix that conforms to the organizational budget. 

If you really want to explore further about pricing, please visit External Experts’ website. We are decade-old digital marketing agency and we offer tailor made solutions for your every business need. 

Conclusively, I would like to assume that you have got a fair amount of input pertaining to SEO techniques and why it is important. With this knowledge, you can start building an effective website that everyone loves to visit.

Having an online presence in the digitized world is essential for any business. This is on the grounds that the web is now considered as one of the reliable sources of income for organizations, people and businesses over the world. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is really an important aspect of business that is very popular since brands are working harder to get positioned higher through search engines. It is along these lines vital to understand what precisely is included in order to help the positioning of your business in search engine listings.

Importance of SEO

When a client enquires on a search engine like Google, there’s a calculation set up that furnishes the searcher with the most pertinent outcomes. Furthermore, if you need your business to fall onto the main page of those results, you should have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy set up.

As per leading research reports, around 93% of online experiences starting with a search engine, an efficient, strategic SEO technique has never been more imperative in setting yourself from the competition. Here are a couple of reasons why SEO is necessary for small companies in 2018:

• Increase website traffic: You need your business to rank as high as feasible for phrases and keywords that fall into your niche. That way, when consumers type in those keywords and expressions, you’ll be comfortably placed at the top for them to click on. For Google specially, 18% of organic clicks move to the number 1 position, while 10% move to the second and 7% in the third, so the higher you rank, the more traffic you will get. This is an incredible method to make customers familiar and help them with their necessities, which can in the end lead to higher sales and development of your business.

• Your competitors are doing it: This isn’t a new fact, but yes, your rivals are also using SEO. Also, much the same as you, they are competing for these top spots in organic search results. Increasing one of the top spots is troublesome in itself, and you should then work continuously to keep up that position. What’s more, don’t fear big brand name contenders. Small and nearby organizations have a great shot at winding up at the top spot of organic search results, as much as their SEO is properly executed implementing the correct strategies.

• It’s here to stay: So long as search engines and calculations exists, SEO isn’t going anyplace. SEO’s significance will just increase as time passes by, so there’s no preferable time to begin putting together your procedure. Strategies and best practices for SEO will keep changing and developing, so it’s imperative to remain well-informed and refreshed on these patterns with the end goal to expand your odds of falling into and remaining in the top spot.

• Build credibility, brand awareness: Say you’re working a salon and somebody in your neighbourhood is searching for a place to get a hair style. If you’ve executed your SEO accurately and filled your site with high-quality content fully packed with these keywords, in a perfect world, you’ll appear in those search items. What’s more, that potential client just may click on your site to learn more about your business. This type of educating enables building of trust and credibility with consumers. It will likewise build your odds of them picking your business over a competitor.

• Optimal reach: People unknowingly trust search engine results. If Google puts a leading John’s eatery in the top spot of a search, it is more likely to have earned that place and it must be great. Users then tells every one of his companions on Facebook and Twitter that he’s setting off to John’s eatery and he invites them, leaving the link for them to click also. The laws of multiplication can work truly quickly, and before you know it, twelve hungry teenagers appear at John’s eatery! Why? Since the search engine coordinated everything impeccably, and everything pointed to John’s eatery.   

• Optimal potential for conversion: Internet marketing, including SEO, attracts individuals who are as of now searching for your product or service. You don’t need to shout, move, or wear cool clothes to pick up a crowd; they are now persuaded of their need which is the reason they went searching in any case. No intense print advertisement placed in the front of the magazine page is required. You simply need to introduce yourself in one of those main 5 results and – voila! They were searching for you and you appeared just right on time! Regardless, you need to persuade them that you are, the better organization to buy from, yet a large portion of the battle is finished. When they go to your site, if you have contributed the same hard work to upgrade the user’s experience with you by giving the content they look for, at that point you are well on your approach to gaining another client.

Some unknown facts about SEO

1. SEO represents search engine optimization: Search engine optimization refers to the gathering of practices intended to enhance your site’s positioning within organic, non-paid search results search results. To put it plainly, SEO aims to enhance your business’ perceivability and drive web traffic to your webpage. An variety of methods are in the SEO toolbox, from keyword optimization to social media movement.
   
2. Pay-per-click advertising have little to no impact on SEO: While pay-per-click promoting (or PPC) is a critical piece of any web based advertising effort and is frequently observed as complimentary to SEO, PPC has no immediate impact on SEO results. Consider it along these lines: PPC is a sort of paid promotion, while SEO means to influence organic search results.
   
3. Your site can be excessively keyword rich: While utilizing the correct keywords is critical, utilizing such a large number of keywords can really hurt your search engine ranking. Overloading your site with keywords will make your webpage be viewed as spam via search engines, and the bugs that web search tools use to index sites are customized to pass over sites that take part in keyword stuffing.
   
4. Images won’t help enhance your search results: Search engines are just fit for analysing content to decide site rankings. Regardless of whether the images on your site have messages in them, the search engine won’t have the capacity to “read” it. Make great utilization of the ALT tag, which enables you to incorporate a searchable content description for your site’s images.
   
5. Internal linking inside your webpage will help support your search engine rankings: Creating a solid system of internal links inside your site can enable better traffic movement to the majority of your website’s discrete pages, which thus, improves search engine rankings. If you can, make internal linking much more powerful by guaranteeing that the content of your links includes relevant keywords.
   
6. Links to your webpage from different sites are also crucial: As with internal linking, links from sites outside of your own play a key role in the calculations used to determine search engine rankings. Investing time to create associations with the webmasters of different sites who might be willing to connect to your business’ webpage can pay off handsomely.
   
7. Social media is a basic piece of any SEO campaign: Cultivating a solid presence on a wide variety of social networking websites and promoting your site’s content on these platforms will enable your business to perform better in search engine rankings. Other than Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, make a profile for your business on any social media channel that is fitting in your industry.
   
8. New content is imperative: The correct keywords used to be enough to move your site to the top of the search results, yet the calculations that search engines utilize have gotten smarter. As these positioning strategies have developed, excellent web content has turned into the main thrust behind a decent search engine showing. Furthermore, offering compelling content can make different sites need to connect to you, further boosting your performance.
   
9. Search engine optimization can be testing, and employing an SEO master can enable you to accomplish the best outcomes: While anybody can start an SEO campaign, accomplishing results is more troublesome. The measure of research and execution time that you face to genuinely streamline your site may not be justified, despite all the trouble; all things considered, you have a business to run. The expense of hiring an SEO expert is effectively counterbalanced by the increased traffic and expanding customer base that your site will experience.
   
10. Do not indulge in black hat SEO: Due to a solid competition in any industry, a few organizations turn to different unlawful procedures trying to get signs of better search engine rankings. Although such strategies may have worked wonderfully for a few companies, it does not hold much credibility anymore since search engine algorithms have turned out to be more intelligent over time. Utilizing these strategies today adds up to the breaking of Google’s guidelines of achieving top organic ranking.

Any choice you make with respect to SEO is essential in deciding the success or failure of your business. Utilizing the correct strategies will empower you to accomplish top rankings and enjoy the different benefits that accompany it. Present day SEO is described by best quality content, quality backlinks and customized long tail keywords that are not spam. Along these lines, search engines are probably going to locate your content effectively and positioning it higher than your rivals.

According to the 2018 Telstra Small Business Intelligence Report , which studied marketing approach and strategies for over 1000 SMEs in Australia, only 50% of small businesses have a website, while only 26% websites and businesses were using SEO tactics. The same study, which also talked to about 1000 consumers, found that on an average, almost 83% consumers agree that search engines like Google are important for finding a business, while 62% of customers said that they will stop considering a business, if information on the company cannot be found online.

This indicates two major points –

1. Small businesses are not taking SEO and online marketing seriously
2. As a result of Point No 1, they are losing customers and business
   Before we start thinking that small businesses and startups are not careful with their marketing strategies, understanding their challenges is important. Besides the obvious financial restraint, many of these new and budding businesses are not utilizing the power of having a website and online strategy, which is costing them huge on an average.
   In this post, we will talk about small business SEO struggles, and why some of these companies are not going right with their online marketing efforts.
3. Because of less money and time.
   It goes without saying that smaller companies and websites don’t have the huge resources like their big brand counterparts. To make it simpler – You have to spend on marketing if you want to gain from it. While SEO is organic, you still have to hire a company or a marketing agency to get the work done, and that requires a monthly budget at the very list. It is also important to understand that SEO
   is an organic process, which means you cannot expect to get gains overnight. Among various small business struggles is the need to keep a constant budget for SEO.
   Most small businesses want to get to the top of Google immediately, or at least, feature on the first place. In order to save money, companies with limited resources and knowledge of SEO dive into the process, which takes away the crucial time. Let’s say you have five people working in the company, and if they are dealing with everything, right from sales and revenue to accounting and SEO, the time obviously is a factor. This is the precise reason why getting SEO help is so, so important.
4. Because they don’t have a marketing team
   Most small businesses are stretched too thin when it comes to marketing, which is also why many owners and managers don many hats at the same time. While this doesn’t obviously translate into great marketing, other work also suffers. Not having a comprehensive and experienced marketing team for SEO is one of the prime mistakes or rather lapses on part of growing businesses. Having a dedicated SEO agency for the job not just adds expertise, but also resources. It goes without saying that a team is better than one SEO expert. Not all SEO companies offer small business solutions, so if you are a new business on the block, some initial research can always come in handy.
5. Because they have client expectations to manage

Small businesses already have a lot on their plate, and without a dedicated SEO firm to handle their campaign efficiently, they often have a hard time achieving the basic results. Many companies, especially the ones that have just started business, are too consumed with the process of satisfying customers, and as a result, they often botch up the marketing aspect. SEO requires time, effort and focus, and to get traffic and boost up on the ranking scale, being at it without a break is critical.

1. Because bigger businesses have been doing it for a while.
   It is a known fact that Google likes older domains, but big businesses also have the advantage of being consistent with SEO and online marketing for a while. These brands weren’t born like that, but a dedicated marketing team and a group of SEO experts worked on every aspect, right from content management, to link building, keywords placement and more. To be more precise, these brands already know what works for them and what doesn’t – i.e. experience, which small businesses don’t have. As a result, new companies often struggle initially to find a foothold with SEO.
2. Because small businesses have smaller websites. A small website always has lesser pages, and the amount of content is also limited. This means that smaller businesses can target fewer keywords, which kind of reduces their chances, compared to big websites that have a huge range of search queries, which only helps in promoting better with SEO. Small websites often have to grapple with the limited scope that their small websites provider. As a business struggling to survive, you have to focus on your website. Having a highly-optioned, well- structured and designed website is not a choice anymore.
3. Because smaller websites and companies don’t create enough content. When it comes to SEO, “Content is king”. Keeping shifting SEO trends in mind, a campaign must be modified, and new content must be generated, and we are talking of relevant content here – No matter whether it’s posts, articles or video content, small companies need to be regular at it, for which the SEO agency hired for the job can offer direction. New companies struggling with marketing must first find an answer to the content problem. Creating content and distributing it effectively to drive traffic to the website are aspects that need attention.
4. Because smaller companies assume more traffic means high conversion. If your SEO strategy is not right i.e. audience specific, you may still get a good number of hits and visits on your website, but that doesn’t translate into a better conversion rate. In simpler words, high traffic doesn’t always mean huge conversions, and as a result, you may not get the profits or sales numbers as expected. Setting up SEO goals is one of the many small business issues, because they want too much, often being obvious to the fact that organic marketing can take time and has its own course.
5. Because rankings may drop unexpectedly. Search engine algorithms do change, and it can be hard for smaller businesses to keep up the momentum, even if they initial succeed with SEO strategies. Many such companies think of this as the end of the road, but this is more of a block, which will pass, if you are focused on SEO and online marketing and keep up and adapt to the changes.
6. Because small companies don’t have media advantage SEO is hard for smaller companies because bigger brands and websites have an obvious advantage of getting media coverage without even trying too hard. Such websites can get links from authority

sites often for free, and getting access to other sources for promotions also gets easier. For smaller companies, the whole process is a tedious one, and unless a SEO team is working extensively to make things happen, brand recognition is complicated.

1. Because SEO tools and software matter
   With limited budgets, small companies cannot afford to invest in SEO tools and expensive software, which aids the online marketing process, and this can stunt growth considerably. Bigger brands can easily spend on tools that can simplify and ease some of the regular tasks involved in SEO and marketing. On the other hand, the new businesses and startups often deal with free tools and the whole process of manual management of SEO work takes much longer time.
2. Because relationship with Google matters
   Small businesses don’t have the required equation with Google. At times when SEO and marketing efforts go haywire, the biggest brands spend time with Google, so that they know what went wrong, which helps in fixing the problem organically as SEO requires. It shouldn’t be surprising that these brands have a personal relationship with the search engine, considering that they spend millions
   each year on ads, which only adds to Google’s revenues. One of the main small business issues is the lack of a reliable equation with Google.
3. Because Google has a thing for brands
   Google relies on content, and brands are a favorite when it comes to search results. This is because these recognizable brand websites usually have more data, and it is rather hard to focus on those keywords and relevant aspects that these brands are targeting. One of the problems small business owners face is the competition, because Google naturally has an incline towards the bigger companies, and it is hard to compete in similar niches targeting same or similar keywords.
   So, is SEO still relevant for smaller brands?
   Absolutely. More people are likely to use Google, Yahoo and Bing to find a local business, and you cannot ignore the scope that SEO offers, both in the short and long run. Not to forget, content visibility depends largely on SEO, and without that, even great content is a waste, unless your intended target audiences finds it on the internet. Keyword optimization is also the third important aspect that matters even for the smallest sites, because unless your website gets indexed, focusing on ranking is not possible at the basic level.
   Hire a SEO agency today!
   We know that one of the many small business marketing challenges is finance, but SEO is considerably cheaper. As such, if you are a small business owner or struggling business reading this, don’t hesitate in paying an agency for your marketing needs, especially SEO. It is critical for the success of your website, and there is no replacement for SEO.