How to Make the Most of Your SEO

Swimming in a world of acronyms, algorithms, and analytics? Consider this blog your lifeboat.

SEO is just one marketing tactic, but most people consider it the most important. Google is the go-to platform for finding products and services. It’s essentially a digital “Main Street.”

You want your business to have the right location and a welcoming presence. These two factors work together to inspire people to “step inside” your website.

As a business owner, you may be asking:

How can I ensure that my website appears in the right location in search results?

How might I better welcome visitors to my website?

If I spend time on my SEO marketing, what will be the ROI?

In this blog, we’ll answer these questions and more. Below we’ve broken down exactly what you need to know in straightforward, actionable steps.

Understand How SEO Can Help Your Business

Put simply, SEO marketing is a tactic for increasing a website’s visibility in search results. Increasing visibility can bring more website traffic and revenue, making it a beneficial strategy for your business.

Typically, businesses perform SEO marketing activities while keeping Google’s best practices in mind. This is because Google maintains an 85% market share compared to other search engines. They also have a powerful algorithm, matching search queries with relevant websites in a creepily accurate fashion.

The benefits—or ROI—of SEO marketing include:

Boosts Your Business’s Visibility

As mentioned above, the main goal of SEO is to boost your visibility online. SEO marketing activities are done continuously to ensure a prominent presence for relevant searches.

Increases Your Website Traffic

By maintaining this visibility, there is a higher likelihood of website traffic. Continuously optimizing your website’s search presence allows you to become the top choice over competitors in your category.

Drives Brand Awareness 

When people search for a product or service category, they are most likely to click on the first result. SEO essentially becomes a competition among you and others in your category. Ranking in the first three results can make a big impact on your brand awareness.

Lifts the Revenue of Your Business

Over time, SEO can make an impact on your bottom line. Revenue growth from SEO is not an overnight success story. It takes consistency to boost your site health, visibility, and organic traffic. It’s a long game that can make an impact on your business.

Develop a Well-Crafted SEO Strategy

To drive long-term success, you need a well-crafted SEO strategy. This is your roadmap for achieving the goals listed above. It keeps your efforts organized, purposeful, and consistent with your overall goal and audience.

Without a strategy, you might miss the mark. A typical strategy includes:

Your Goal for SEO

If you’re new to SEO, you may need to start by increasing your website’s visibility. With low visibility, you can’t expect awareness, traffic, or revenue. You will need to start with tactics such as keyword research and content.

Let’s say you are driving a lot of website traffic because of ongoing SEO efforts. However, you would like to see more revenue generated from these website visitors. In this case, user experience may become your most important SEO tactic.

Audience Research

Develop audience personas of the customers most likely to visit your website and buy. Who are your top 2-3 customers? To reach them effectively with SEO, it’s important to understand their behaviors, mindsets, and pain points. This will give you a basic understanding of what, when, why, and how they search so you can best tailor their experience.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is foundational. By understanding what your audience is searching for, you can better craft content that meets their needs. Below we’ll explain more about keyword research, including benefits, tools, and techniques.

Content Strategy

Once you have a list of target keywords, you can begin to plan the content you will create. You need to integrate relevant keywords throughout your website, whether through blogs, product descriptions, videos, infographics, and more. We’ll dive deeper into the importance of a content strategy below.

On-Page Optimization

To show your website in search results, Google needs to crawl your website. It crawls all of the elements on your pages to better understand what your website is about and how it needs to be shown. These elements include:

• Meta titles and meta descriptions: Short descriptions of the content on a page. These will appear in search results and impact your rankings and engagement rate.
• Page headings: Headers for page and page sections that organize content and ensure search engine and user-friendliness.
• Image tags: Titles for website images. They describe the photo to search engines, people with disabilities, and those who can’t see images on their browsers. Image tags also appear if your image fail to load.

Technical SEO

Keyword research and on-page optimization are often the first tactics considered in an SEO strategy. However, there’s so much more that happens behind the scenes. The technical, back-end elements of your website have a huge effect on your ability to rank in search results.

User Experience

You may spend a lot of time writing high-quality content. However, the speed in which your website loads can either attract customers or completely turn them away. It’s important for visitors to easily find what they need, especially on a mobile device. User experience is another important tactic to consider for your SEO.

Backlink Building

The Google algorithm incentivizes authority. You gain authority by obtaining reputable websites to link back to your website through backlinks. Backlink building is an ongoing process that can help establish trustworthiness over time.

Local SEO

If you service a specific area, local SEO is a tactic you need in your toolkit. Local SEO includes the management of a Google My Business listing. This involves continuously increasing positive reviews and responding to negative reviews over time.

Reporting and Analysis

When you put work into your SEO, you need a feedback loop. You can conduct measurement of your efforts through Google Analytics (GA4) and an SEO tool like SEMrush. By reviewing your SEO analytics over time, you can glean powerful insights that inform your strategy and action items.

Understand What Your Audience is Searching For

Keyword research is a crucial aspect of your SEO strategy. Crucial. You cannot begin creating valuable website content without first knowing what questions and phrases your audience is searching. Below we’ve outlined the key benefits of keyword research.

Discover Trending Topics in Your Industry

Keyword research shows the popular topics and words people search for related to your business. From trending product searches to frequently asked questions, this information provides powerful insights. By creating content that answers their needs, you can boost your credibility, visibility, and longevity in the digital realm.

Learn More About Your Audience

Keyword research can also help you understand how people discuss your products and services. As an expert, you might use a common industry term to refer to one of your services or products. However, the typical, everyday person may not. It’s important to understand what words people are using in order to best reach them.

Gain Insight into Competition

Furthermore, keyword research gives you insight into the competition that exists for your target keywords. Some keywords may be harder to rank for than others. Keyword research can help you identify a sweet spot – relevant keywords with high volume and low competition.

Reach People Where They Are in Their Journey

Someone with no knowledge of your product or service category searches differently than someone with a lot of knowledge. The former may need additional education or time researching, while the latter may be ready to buy.

For example, someone with little knowledge of what shoes they are looking for may simply search “shoes.” Someone who is ready to buy is more likely to search for “best hiking shoes for rough terrain.” This longer phrase is known as a long tail keyword and indicates a propensity to purchase.

Tools and Techniques for Keyword Research

If you’re reading this, we know your eager to learn the “how.” At MLCworks, we conduct keyword research for clients with a tool called SEMrush. It’s a tool for finding keywords, checking site health, monitoring keyword rankings, and studying competition.

With a tool like SEMrush, you are able to identify:

• Your average search position for specific keywords
• Your average search position across all keyword searches
• Your share of voice compared to competitors
• Relevant keywords you have the opportunity to rank for
• Top keywords competitors are ranking for
• Long-tail content topics related to target keywords
• Search intent behind certain keywords
• Keyword trends
• Site health
• Errors that may be affecting site health and ability to rank
• And so much more…

This may seem like a lot of information. Our SEO experts at MLCworks analyze this information every day, distilling it into valuable insights and action plans. This information is everchanging, depending on the competitive landscape, Google algorithm updates, and consumer behavior. With MLCworks, you’ll have a dedicated team watching and optimizing your website.

Leverage Content Marketing for SEO Success

Successful SEO marketing starts with giving people what they want: great informative content. Thankfully, like your customers, Google also loves content.

Think of Google as a partner. You want to provide your customers with useful information, and Google is dedicated to creating relevant and satisfactory search experiences. High-quality content on your website meets both of these goals.

SEO marketing starts with developing website content with an intentional focus on the keywords your audience uses. Examples include blogs, videos, and infographics that contain up-to-date, relevant information your audience is seeking. As mentioned above, this content is developed by first answering the following questions:

• Who makes up your audience?
• What is your goal?
• What keywords is your audience searching for?
• What topics are of interest to your audience?

These questions lay the seeds needed to reap all of the benefits of content marketing. Our team digs into these questions to fuel our monthly content development plans. This plan is essentially a calendar of the high-priority keywords and content to tackle each month. We then will measure content performance to understand what’s working and where you have the opportunity to grow.

Leverage Local SEO in Your Strategy

No matter the size of your company or business, local SEO should be a priority. It is important for both big companies with multiple offices and small businesses with only one store. In fact, 46% of Google searches are local-focused.

Local SEO takes up a large portion of real estate within the SERP (search engine results page). Optimizing for local is the way to make sure you rank. This simple-seeming path to the top of Google’s organic search results includes some high-dollar perks.

What gets you to the top of that list?

• Building geo-specific content, when appropriate
• Making sure your Google listing is optimized to the fullest
• Responding to reviews (reputation management)
• Claiming and optimizing other relevant listings
• Generating high-quality social media content
• Building links with other local companies

Furthermore, local three-pack listings (below) are especially important for searches done on a mobile device. 44% of people who conduct a local search click on the options in a local 3-pack.

Regardless of size, any business with a physical location must optimize for local SEO. If your business has multiple locations, it’s important to build local landing pages for each of them.

Google’s local search algorithm considers your location when searches are close to you, using a proximity factor. This happens even when the searcher doesn’t include a city name or “near me” in their search.

Optimize Your Site with a Team Driven by Data

At MLCWorks, data drives everything we do. Our Louisiana-based SEO team dedicates itself to driving visitors to your website and converting them into customers. To start the conversation, we’re offering you a free website audit to determine the “health” of your website.

A website audit allows you to see what is strong—and what needs to be fixed—on your website. From there, we can develop an action plan to boost your website’s visibility and traffic. With in-depth research and data-driven decisions, we can help you meet your business goals.

Ready to start a conversation about your SEO marketing strategy? Get in touch today!