How to Dominate Google: SEO is the answer.
SEO has been around for sometime now, however the change in the industry has been both consistent and rapid, our SEO in Belfast has grown year on year with the shift to business online and the continued growth in the digital marketing sector.
While SEO is hugely a trial and error process – that being down to the fact that Google doesn’t tell all of its secrets within its algorithm – there are so many tried and tested methods that you can utilise to increase traffic to your website and there are new methods and hacks coming to us weekly on how best to beat your competition and have huge success, something we are proud to do everyday for our clients.
No matter what stage you are in your journey – Be Bold.
1. Attract Customers Before They are Ready to Buy
Keywords cost money, we all know that, but the beautiful thing about SEO is that while the initial investment might be high (in some cases, nothing good is ever free), the ROI that you will get as you begin to rank in the top spots and your investment requirements go down is life changing .
Buyer intent keywords are the keywords that you want primarily (in turn – the most expensive) – these are the ones that someone is there, searching and ready to buy on the spot.
This goes for not only SEO but pay per click as well. Just because these keywords might be out of the budget range, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go after them. Rather, just adapting your method, here you need to be patient, organic rankings take time!
With SEO – Patience is a Virtue!
No matter how long it takes you to rank, take the steps, if you aren’t in you can’t win. Remember that people, more often than not research before they buy. If you can grab those people in this stage, you can get their clicks for little to no money. They might not be as lucrative as they are more informational, but what they do hold is an opportunity.
Use the SEO Tools Available!
SEMRush, Ahrefs, Uber Suggest, and Answer the public are just a few of the tools that are available to you, don’t just use one, use them all, come to a decision based of data, not thought.
These different tools offer up the less competitive keywords that have a similar search pattern.
If you use all of the tools that are readily available to you, gather the information and create content around the buyers’ queries, ‘what does ….. do?’.
You don’t always have to do this through the blog section on your website, but you can create landing pages that are focused solely on the keyword that you are trying to rank for.
This is how most people generate their sales from content marketing.
2. Land to Expand
As we have said time and time again, SEO is something that requires a great deal of patience. The land and expand strategy? What on earth is that your probably thinking, so here’s how it works.
Again, use your tools, head over to the Google Search console into the performance section and you will find the keywords that you are already ranking for. Click into the most popular term that you already rank for and then through to pages.
Here you will find a report that shows you a URL linked to the page that ranks for that term.
Use your tools and find keyword ideas surrounding that keyword.
There will be a long list of long-tail keywords presented to you, from here select the ones that are intent loaded and then add those into the page that you are already ranking for the other term.
Now, make sure not to just add in the terms and turn your back, adjust the original content so that they fit in with the narrative so it doesn’t appear spammy.
This is the User experience that will be affected if you miss out on this crucial stage and we all know what Google thinks of a bad user experience.
3. Building Your Brand
Google, as of late, has put more emphasis on brands. If you have a strong brand, then in turn, you will rank faster. Focusing on your brand and having a solid message is the key to driving traffic.
There are an abundance of brands out there and touching on Ex-CEO from Google’s wise words:
“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool”
Monitor your brand’s growth through the use of Google Trends. Here you can not only see your performance but also your competitors.
There is no hack that will make your brand skyrocket through the ranks, but there is always a way to stand out and spark interest – BE BOLD!
Out there in the big bad world, if you are a new business, any business for that matter. You are just a drop in the ocean, the ocean being information and content, standing out from the crowd as well as doing all of the conventional steps like running ads, blogging and speaking at conferences.
4. Build a Better Mousetrap
Building links is still very important, Google of course is looking at other factors, but links help with ranking. There are over a billion blogs in the world, so it is becoming increasingly difficult to build links.
So how do you build links without the spammy, ‘link for a link’ emails?
Make it so that people want to link to you without you asking for it. Offer real value with your content and make it useful to people.
Putting money into things like animated infographics, sparking humour, getting engagement, all of this will drive natural backlinks to start occurring.
Some companies have such success with these and end up going viral.
Touching back to our BE BOLD comment. In terms of the number of people that you can get through your site, it can be more effective to spend the money on building your mousetrap than spending it on marketing. This is why our web design Belfast services are in high demand – we build from the ground up with SEO in mind, in other words:
“We build sites that speak to Google: Speed, user friendly and informative – aka your site is the answer to your target audiences questions.”
Conclusion
I hope that the main point you take away from this is that there are so many factors that are influential in your ranking, but underlying and not technically ranked, is to be bold. If you step outside your comfort zone, think outside the box and be BOLD, the people will come to you.
SEO can be somewhat of a taboo topic, there is a lot of industry cowboys, as there is with everything, so if you are thinking of investing in SEO and you just aren’t quite sure where to start, give us a call for some advice – we want to break the industry stigma with our transparent services and give businesses the boost they deserve.
If you are looking for fast results, think outside the box and endeavour to be the answer to your target audiences questions.