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Search Engine Optimization: Increase traffic and reach with SEO

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05/02/2019
Reading time: 13 minutes

Today, search engines are part of our digitized everyday life, no matter if B2B or B2C. They are indispensable for our information procurement.

In this article we will explain how you can use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in your target group as a power channel, increase your reach and which mistakes you have to avoid.

What is SEO and how can you use it?

I often hear from many leading experts that SEO is an essential ingredient of any business success. One may think: “Okay, what’s so special about it? I own a website which is easily found when I type the name of my company in the Google search field.” I got curious about search engine optimization, about the mechanism behind it and how I can get the most of it for my traffic.

Let’s keep it simple: SEO is a channel that makes you, your content and your precious offers organically visible to your potential customers when they use search engines. It also has the potential to bring the volume and quality of your traffic to your website on the whole new level.

While only a few years ago your success in the web was strongly influenced by keywords which means it can be manipulated, nowadays the emphasis is increasingly put on the value that your content can offer to potential visitors.
When your content satisfies visitors to your website then search engines like Google, Bing and other receive a signal that your website is important and you become more visible in the huge world of information.

SEO isn’t a channel that can be switched on by pressing the button and steaming a visitor directly to your website. On the other hand, this is a very sustainable method.

What SEO is all about

The essence of SEO is in making the content of your website generate value to your potential customers and make it easy for any search engine to find your website among thousands of search results. We can distinguish two major SEO areas:

Onpage SEO describes the manipulations you make directly to a web page to facilitate higher ranking, making your content text original and engaging, and semantically correct, for instance.
Offpage SEO refers to all of the SEO practices that take place outside of your websites such as backlinks, link relevancy, social signals and many other curious things. It can also refer to speed optimization of your hosting provider as well as building links to other websites.

Search engine optimization: facts and figures

According to Netmarketshare 76% margin of the worldwide searches belongs to Google

The renewal oft he existent content, adding some new pictures and videos and the following republishing can encourage traffic boost by 111% (according to Backlinko)

The survey by Search Engine Land (as of 2016) indicates that the voice search is increasing its percentage making up 10% of the global search volume.

4 mistakes to avoid when performing SEO

Keyword Stuffing

Some people might believe that keywords that make your website so much more visible in the search engine filters have to cram every sentence of your content. This technique has been popular for quite some time. Cramming a keyword as many times as possible into your copy makes one thing very obvious to both readers and search engines: your content is trashy.
Keyword stuffing simply doesn’t work anymore, because search engines indicate them as spam.

Ignoring internal links

From the point of view of both user experience and SEO ranking, internal links are incredibly important. Should you neglect the links between your website and your articles, and it won’t be long before everyone notices irregularities and unevenness between separate pages.

Broken Links

Defective links are definitely incredibly disappointing and annoying for your visitors and are inappropriate for search engines. Such errors occur when content has been removed or deleted, or the entire URL structure of your website is altered.

Picture search

In the course of creating and uploading content, you will surely regularly use lots of images because they make your content look more appealing and engaging. It actually offers another opportunity to attract potential customers‘ attention to you, which is often overlooked. ALT-Attributes is where potential is presented with the image material you provide. It also makes the content of your image materials comprehensible for search engines.

There are some more mistakes people make with SEO, and they are laid out in detail in this cool Infographic by professionals from RYTE.

SEO is just the beginning

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Classification of Search Engine Optimization in the Online Marketing Context

Social and display advertising throughout the marketing funnel

In Marketing Funnel as a whole, the activities you perform with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are located between Top of the Funnel and the middle range.

The focus here is on measures that (potential) customers first become aware of you and your solutions and want to learn more about you.

Immediate impact on sustainability

Compared to sales, organic search engine optimization does not have a strong instant impulse that encourages purchase.

When it comes to sustainability, SEO is clearly ahead as the value of good content can even be increased over time.

Classification in the channel portfolio

When you compile your portfolio of channels and actions, SEO will typically have the function of acting as a network. With good content and the right keywords, your potential customers will become aware of you.

This channel therefore works best in combination with the medium and short-term channels.

4 Frequently underestimated tips and hacks in search engine optimization

Tune your page speed

There are a lot of analysis tools. One of them is GT Metrix. It clearly shows the time length it takes for your website pages to load so that you can figure out if you need to improve something, and if yes, what exactly you can improve.

Launch your mobile version from the very kickoff

Being the most powerful and popular search engine as of today, Google has expanded your search options and now you can google anything from anywhere just using your phone. Mobile search queries have long overtaken desktop user search behaviors. If you decided to optimize and streamline your business, or you are just at the very beginning of propelling yourself onto the market, start from the mobile version right from the outset. By the way, Google offers its own Mobile Site Tester, which you can use for free.

Specific search engines

Who only thinks that Google or Bing are the only search engines, has far missed. Besides DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or for other areas of the world among other things also Yandex work. Other platforms also act as search engines, even if at first glance they are not. Youtube makes sense for you, for example, if you provide a lot of video content. Amazon makes sense as a search engine if you offer many products.

Long-tail and specific search words

Short and very general search terms are usually highly competitive and it is difficult to get into the top 10 in search results. That’s why long tail keywords that you specialize in make sense. These are terms that describe the product or service even more precisely. Instead of “vacuum cleaner” it could be “vacuum cleaner without paper bag”.

SEO comes down to the following indicators

Organic visitors

The number of organic visitors on your website is considered to be one of the most important figures. You should make sure that every visitor generates more sessions on your website and clicks on as many pages as possible.

Indexed pages

Robots.txt and sitemap.xml are the data that search engine crawler shrinks to find your pages faster. It allows crawlers to index your pages, while you make the prepared Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml accessible through Google Search Console.

Webpage Ranking

Rankings in SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) demonstrate the authority of your website. You can use Google Search Console to see the position of your website as well as other interesting facts concerning your ranking.

Visibility index

The SISTRIX Visibility Index is a reference number for a domain’s visibility in Google’s search result pages. It is well-suited to measuring and rating the success of SEO-actions or to analyzing the consequences of changes in the Google search algorithm. In particular, it is interesting to track the changes during some period of time and analyze it in comparison to competition are interesting.

Get going!

SEO is the long-term and sustainable tool to pick up potential customers in their own search already. In the marketing funnel, Search Engine Optimisation is in the Top of the Funnel, i.e. at the very beginning.

If you understand how your potential customers search and you deliver great added value with your content and images, then this is the first step. The second is the user experience, which you provide via factors such as the loading time of your website and good links.

And now: Analyze your website, understand the search behaviour and keywords of your customers and integrate them into your content.

Manuel Schmidt

About Me

As a growth marketing expert and customer developer, I experience every day how important a customer-centric corporate culture is.

In combination with agile testing and optimization processes, you will bring your growth fully on course.

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Search Engine Optimization: Increase traffic and reach with SEO