Your site is built and you’re ready to invite people from anywhere and everywhere to check out your content. Assuming you’ve built a solid foundation on the basics – relevant original content and easy navigation – here are valuable SEO strategies to maximize your content marketing efforts.
Low Cost Hosting
One way to cut hosting costs of a website is to use a platform such as iPage. Not only does it only cost a few dollars per month, it provides user-friendly tools, making it easy for anyone to create websites. This solution can be used by website owners or an outsourced online marketing team to cut costs. At the same time, iPage provides useful tools for creating very professional websites.
Easy Access Business Information
When people come to your site they should be able to figure out immediately where they can find answers to their questions about your business, especially contact information. If you don’t include a contact page, at least give some type of contact information such as an email address or social media profile on your about page.
The easiest way to ensure visitors have no way to get confused or lost about your business location or who to contact, is to include contact information or a link to it at the top of your home page. Links to social media profiles are extremely powerful CTAs to encourage interaction with your brand.
Another reason why you need easy-to-find CTAs relates to your mobile audience that uses smartphones to make purchasing decisions while shopping. You can increase conversions if you provide easy access to coupons or coupon codes. Many local brick and mortar businesses still promote their phone numbers and physical addresses at the top of every page to remind followers that their businesses are more than just websites.
Fresh Brand-Building Content
Whether your site comprises articles, blogs, videos or other formats, you must constantly update your content to stay relevant. Websites that only consist of less than ten pages and never evolve, tend to never develop a significant following, even if those ten pages are incredibly awesome. People have more reason to return to your site if it keeps growing in content. This article provides important tips for building and managing SEO-driven web content.
A key SEO advantage to creating as many web pages as possible through an expanding blog series is that it gives you increasing opportunities to get indexed by search engines. Google is more likely to take your site seriously as a hub for authoritative thought leadership if you keep adding valuable original content about your brand. Over half of websites worldwide use a Content Management System (CMS) to make content creation more efficient, according to W3Techs.
Brand awareness is essential to business success, since consumers witness hundreds to thousands of brands per day. They have so many choices thrown at them during any given online session, that you need to take measures to ensure web visibility. The more informative web pages you add to your site, the better chances you have of attracting people in your target market. Here are SEO factors in which Google weighs strongly in its search rankings:
- High-quality content.
- Relevant link building.
- Elaborate content of at least 1,000 words.
- Use of at least a single image.
Part of what drives traffic is SEO, but it’s worth repeating that another crucial component is updating your content. According to HubSpot, sites that publish over 16 blogs per month get three times more traffic than sites with less than five new posts per month. Another interesting statistic is that updating old text and images can increase organic traffic by over 100%.
Customer Reviews
The reason it’s important to allow audience interaction through a social media company is because customer reviews are now a huge influence on final purchasing decisions made by consumers. The public now puts more faith in reviews than from media advertising. If you find that negative feedback overshadows positive feedback on your social media profile, take that as a marketing research hint.
Something you must realize before trying to craft a scheme to flood the internet with positive reviews is that most consumers have become skeptical of overly positive reviews. If every review is a glowing endorsement packed with marketing jargon, guess what happens? People think the reviews are fake. They even have tools to investigate review authenticity.
If automated software determines that too many positive reviews trace back to the same email account, it could be a red flag to many objective observers. Search engines might penalize and downgrade those reviewers as web spammers. Allowing a certain amount of negative reviews can give a more authentic presentation. Negatives can become positives by learning from consumer feedback what improvements need to be made.
You can expand your site’s universe of online reviews by encouraging customers to post reviews on third part local directories such as Yelp. You can also increase exposure of consumer feedback by including video testimonials on your web pages. Videos can be the best vehicles to share product information, particularly with product demonstrations and honest customer testimonials of how brand experiences met or exceeded expectations and improved people’s lives.
Focus on Direct Call-To-Action
Your site needs an obvious call-to-action at the top of every page to encourage visitors to check out your content. CTAs come in many forms, usually as short text phrases or buttons with short messages, symbols or images. They hold monumental importance in directing attention toward a specific action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form or clicking to learn more.
The most important aspect of CTAs to remember, besides making them obvious, is that they are easy-to-read and have a clear purpose. Some website owners prefer buttons that say “buy now,” while others want to present less of a sales push, so they add extra layers to the sales funnel for information seekers.
The sales funnel represents the path you pave with breadcrumbs to lead your prospects to whatever golden treasure you’ve crafted for them. Web pages full of informative nuggets are the breadcrumbs while your golden treasure is whatever purchasing opportunities you present for your target followers. CTAs are like the billboards and freeway signs that invite people to the places and stories you offer to make their journey more interesting. Ideally, this journey will lead to establishing long-term relationships with customers.
Conclusion
Websites come and go, but if you want yours to last for years and grow through time, it’s wise to implement a set of basic and creative strategies. Don’t be afraid to allow interactivity with your audience and be bold enough to give clear call-to-action statements that direct followers to your landing pages. You have the best chances of gaining high search engine visibility by embedding SEO strategies into your content presentation.