Learning how to grow your business using optimization tips is a crucial step to developing a powerful eCommerce platform. Your online presence is as important as your physical one, and in many instances, more important. Be sure to get the best results using these tips.
Local Optimization Tips
Depending on the topic of your webpage, you may find that your keywords are over-saturated. For example, a website focused on debt help or website building must compete against mammoth sites that have thousands of pages of content.
In essence, you can never outrank these pages straight up. Luckily, there‘s one way to get some headway, think local. Localizing your searches cuts down the competition considerably. The best part is that Google already localizes searches. When you type pizza in your search query, your results will usually list a bunch of local options first, before the national search results appear.
Your goal is to try and rank in this section first. This isn’t too difficult to do. You just need to localize your content. Focus on local stories, cities, regions, or events. All of this localization helps Google and your visitor understand that you are a crucial part of the community.
More than Ranking
Optimization is about more than just ranking, it’s also about growing your business. You want to be able to not only get more out of your current visitors, but you also want to drive new traffic to your webpage. In order to do this, you are going to need an optimization strategy.
Optimization Tips
Outline Your Strategy – Optimization Tips
Your optimization strategy needs to have a starting point. Basically, what pages are you going to optimize first? The rule of thumb here is to start where you earn. In other words, start evaluating the highest return pages. These pages deserve the first services.
To determine a pages’ rank you can take some analytics data such as unique visitors per day, and place it next to the profitability, or potential profitability of the page in question. If you focus on high click rate pages, you can help visitors to make the decision to interact.
Content Tips – Optimization Tips
One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is valuable content. Well written content drives traffic. Also, use topic clusters to continue the growth pattern. Topic clusters are interlinking related topic pages.
Search engines love to see this strategy employed. It lets them know that you are a part of the overall data on the subject. Clusters are powerful when used correctly because of the new manner in which search engines field results.
Originally, search engines tried to match your query word-for-word. Nowadays, semantic searches are the norm. These searches evaluate the overall message of your search query to better determine what results to display. Cluster pages tell Google that you are creating content to support a large research page.
Keep it SMART
- Specific – What is your strategy and who are the people involved? What type of resources do you require to complete the project? What is the overall goal of your project?
- Measurable – Being able to measure your results is paramount to your ability to adjust your strategy accordingly. Analytics is a critical component of this step. You will want to monitor the results every step of the way.
- Attainable – Be realistic with your strategy. Don’t add sections that you don’t have the knowledge, skills, network, or funding to achieve. Keeping your goals within reach will help you to achieve them more frequently. In turn, your overall master plan will unfold much smoother.
- Relevant – Make sure each part of your strategy correlates to your overall goal. You don’t want to waste time during this process on other projects that don’t directly link to your optimization strategy.
- Timely – You need to set a time frame for your optimizations to complete. The best strategy here is to create an implementation chart. Using a spreadsheet, break down your strategy into small steps. Next place a date, next to each step. In this manner, you can easily track if you are on schedule. Importantly, if you notice you are falling behind, you can double up on the work to bring your project back up to speed. Doubling up can mean hiring more help, or expanding your workload until you are back on schedule.
Write for Your Readers – Not Google
The number one way to get your website in front of new visitors is to create thought-provoking content. Exclusive content creates a bond between you, your visitors, and Google. In many instances, businesses seek to try and write for the search engine spiders.
This strategy only hurts your search results for a couple of key reasons. For one, Google has some of the smartest minds, Advanced AI, and various other protocols to determine the quality of your content. All of these tools monitor your content but most importantly, they monitor your visitor’s responses.
Optimization Tips
You heard right, no matter how many keywords you stuff on your page, you will never get the ranking of an informative piece of unique content. Search engines such as Google award your webpage credit for how long a visitor stays on it or if they scroll down a page, favorite, like, share, or link to you from another page.
All of these actions verify to the search engine that you provide valuable content to users. Once you are certified as a source of valuable content, both visitors and spiders will come to your webpage daily to see what’s new.
