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| The importance of SEO in marketing your business |
Have you heard the term SEO but wondered what it stands for? You may know it stands for "search engine optimization," but do you know the real value of SEO in marketing your business?
Imagine you need something - a product or service. How are you? you google it, right? Then Google spits out a page of search results related to what you're looking for so you can make a selection and proceed with your purchase.
With SEO you ensure that your company website is shown on this search results page. And it's absolutely vital that potential customers find you.
There are entire companies dedicated to SEO and the process can be complicated and expensive at times, but don't worry! There are several DIY ways to rank your website higher in search results.
Read on to find out what SEO really means and how you can use it to market your business.
CONTENT
What does SEO stand for?
Introducing our SEO tool for small businesses
How to improve search engine optimization
1. Check your website
2. Optimize your web pages
3. Increase your popularity with backlinks
What are backlinks and why are they important?
How do I get more backlinks?
Stay up to date with SEO
SEO Quick Start Action Plan
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” but to fully answer your question, the simple meaning of SEO in marketing your business is the process of improving your website so that search engines like Google are more likely to show your business in users' search results.
Website SEO involves technical optimization as well as keyword research, implementing those keywords into your website, and continually improving your content to make it easier for users to find. If that still sounds complicated, that's okay. There's an easier way to manage your own SEO efforts.
Introducing our SEO tool for small businesses
We believe SEO should be a priority for your business and we want to help you with that. That's why we're expanding our online marketing platform with SEO tools that give you personalized recommendations that will help you rank higher in search results and drive more traffic to your website.
If you're a Constant Contact customer, check out how to get started with our SEO tool and start improving your search ranking today! In just a few steps, we'll scan and analyze your website, giving you clear step-by-step instructions to follow to ensure more customers find you online.
How to improve search engine optimization
Improve search engine optimization with Constant Contact's SEO tool
Constant Contact's SEO tool makes it easy to see how your website is performing in terms of SEO.
It also suggests simple step-by-step guides to improve your search rankings.
Let's take a look at some steps you can take to drastically improve your website's SEO.
1. Check your website
It's important to know how your website performs in terms of SEO before you can understand how to improve it. You should scan your website regularly with an SEO tool to track your progress over time and keep your website ranked high in search results. Some of the most important things to look at are:
Speed
Does your website load quickly or do visitors have to wait while the content slowly crawls across the screen?
Mobile friendliness
Does your website look and work well on mobile devices? Most people use mobile devices to surf the Internet.
Error Pages and Broken Links
Don't you find it frustrating when you click on a link and end up on that infamous 404 error page? So do your customers and search engines.
Security
Is your site secure? Do you have a valid SSL certificate from your domain provider?
Page Title
Does each website have a clear and concise title? Are there duplicate titles in the search results
Keyword Optimization . Keywords are the words that you want to rank for when someone types them into a search engine. It's important to build your content around these words. They should be present throughout your site, but most importantly in:
page title
Meta descriptions and alt tags (image descriptions)
headlines
This list is not exhaustive, but includes some of the most important factors to consider when considering your website's SEO.
Now that you know how your website is performing, let's look at how you can improve your SEO and rank higher in search results!
2. Optimize your web pages
Once you've completed your audit, it's time to improve your search rankings on your most important websites. This is the part of SEO where these keywords come into play. You should make sure to include them in several important areas of your website as mentioned above.
When you use our SEO tool, we automatically suggest some actions you can take to quickly optimize your website.
SEO suggestions to improve search ranking and increase website traffic
Constant Contact's SEO tool gives you a list of high-priority actions to boost the search ranking of each of your webpages.
Optimization isn't just about tagging, cleaning, and organizing your site's content. A big part of your SEO strategy should be content creation. If you regularly update your website with fresh, quality content - blog posts, videos, testimonials, etc. - you are more likely to rank well in search results.
3. Increase your popularity with backlinks
What are backlinks and why are they important?
Simply put, a backlink is a link on another website that leads back to your website. Google and other search engines like to see lots of backlinks pointing to your site because it's a way of recognizing that your content is valuable and reputable. The more reputable websites that link to yours, the more likely it is that you will be ranked in the search results.
Backlinks monitoring in search engine optimization
Our SEO tool shows you exactly how many backlinks are pointing to your website and monitors your progress as you keep improving your SEO.
How do I get more backlinks?
The best way to generate a large number of backlinks is to create quality content that people will want to share or reference from their websites.
An easy and timely way to get backlinks is to guest post on a reputable blog. In return for a well-designed blog post, the blog owner will likely provide you with a backlink or two from their site.
Here are some other ways to increase your backlink count fast:
Link your personal websites to your corporate website
Make sure your business has accurate information on various listing and review sites like Yelp and Google Business Profile.
Ask for press coverage of your business to link to your website
Be sure to share your website and content on social media and encourage others to do so
Stay up to date with SEO
Search engine optimization is not a one-time task. It's something you want to monitor and continuously improve over time. Consider doing this with a quality tool to ensure you get the most of your time and money.
You can find the new SEO tools in your Constant Contact account by clicking on the "Website" tab and then clicking on "SEO". Here are some additional measures I recommend going into the SEO section of your Constant Contact account as soon as possible to monitor and improve your SEO:
SEO Quick Start Action Plan
Open the SEO tool in your Constant Contact account
Add your top SEO keywords to track your rankings
Add your SEO competitors so you can track them too and make sure your search results compete with theirs
Sign up for a monthly email update on your website's SEO
Connect your account to Google Analytics to view detailed visitor information from your SEO dashboard.
