Digital First But Physically enhanced business
SEO Packages - Best Building Blocks
SEO is the basis for all online promotion
SEO is a Competition
Do you know how many websites there are on the internet? Close to 2 billion! That’s a lot of competition for SEO Packages. The chances are that you will have some of those websites competing with your website
So if you’re serious about promoting your business online you need to know that it is going to take effort and resources. In order for your site or individual pages to get delivered high up in search results you need to be better than the competition. This process is an ongoing competition. Do you have what it takes?
At The Online Marketer we can help you.
You’ve got to love the Internet!
It’s a beautiful place where you can find almost anything you want. You can share your story with people just like you, and find answers to questions that have been plaguing you since elementary school. And if you’re lucky and dedicated enough, you can even turn a profit doing what you love. But getting your website in front of the right people isn’t always easy.
That’s where search engine optimisation comes in.
So What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving how your company or organisation’s website appears in search results from major search engines, including Google and Bing, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Ask Jeeves, AOL Search, and many others. It isn’t the same as pay-per-click advertising, (also known as search engine marketing -SEM) which places ads on websites for a fee.
With good SEO, your website is able to appear higher in search results for free—without paying for an ad spot—and often to a wider audience than with paid ads (depending on which keywords are used). SEO packages are specialised consulting to assist you get your SEO done.
Why is SEO so Important?
If we could say one thing about SEO packages that would be most important for any business owner to understand, it would be this: SEO increases traffic to your website.
While SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation”, which is the process of improving the visibility of a website or webpage on a search engine results page. In other words, SEO is the process of maximising the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine (Google, Bing, etc.)
SEO is best described as a collection of strategies and tactics whose goal is to increase your websites visibility in search engines.
Why should you spend time and resources on SEO packages?
The landscape of online marketing has changed drastically over the last decade, and there are a lot of reasons why SEO is so important. But if you’re just getting started, let’s take a look at some of the long-term benefits of investing in SEO for your website.
For starters, SEO is a tried-and-true method for bringing new people to your website. It can help build your brand by positioning you as an industry leader and trusted authority in your field, which can be invaluable when it comes time to pitching big clients and other opportunities. The internet is the great leveller. It’s an online representation of your business. People who find relevant and useful content believe that you know what you are doing. It matters not how big your premises are or how many staff you employ. they are just interested in how you can solve their problems.
So SEO isn’t just about growing your audience—it’s also going to help you keep that audience. When you’ve built up a big following that’s interested in what you have to say, they’ll be more likely to come back again and again over time. Even better: they’ll start to trust you more and more, which means that when you pitch them on new products or services, they’re going to be more likely to listen because they know what you stand for!
In order to understand why SEO is so important lets look at other forms of promotion. One alternative to search engine optimization is PPC or pay per click advertising campaigns. You might have heard of Facebook and Google ads. These ads allow you to target people who have already expressed interest in your product or services, so you don’t have to waste time trying to convince them of something they aren’t interested in.
In the case of Google Ads, when your content has good visibility as a result of SEO, the cost of pay per click advertising to that page drops dramatically. Google rewards you for your relevant content. Google Ads provide a quick win and this strategy should never be ignored but SEO is the gift that keeps on giving.
It is apparent therefore that SEO should be a foundational part of your online presence.
The key concept here is relevance.
The truth is, these alternative options to SEO are limited. PPC might work in the short term, but it doesn’t have the long term benefits of SEO. Why not? For starters, some of the alternatives have a lower conversion rate. Studies have shown that when people find your landing page via a search on the internet that they are more likely to convert than discovering your site through other means such as referrals, paid advertising and social media.
To top it off, some of these other options are extremely expensive—like TV ads and billboards—which means they’re not very cost effective in terms of return on investment. And let’s just say that the last thing you want to do is put all your eggs in one basket. You don’t want to put all your faith in one particular option if it’s not working out for you. Don’t waste time—or money—on something that isn’t providing positive results!
But SEO… SEO is different. It has a high conversion rate compared to other marketing efforts, so you know what? You’ll probably sell more stuff than ever before with a better ROI
Search engine optimisation has more potential than just targeted traffic and offers lower costs over time.
Structure of a website
An integral part of SEO practice is to look at the structure of a website. One of the big factors that search engines look at when deciding how to rank websites is to evaluate the user experience on the site. issues such as is the website structured in a logical manner, Will the user be able to find the relevant content? Is the content engaging and visible on all devices? Is the content relevant and does it inform and educate people searching for solutions.
Knowing what content to produce
Research is key
It’s not easy to come up with a website content strategy. If you don’t know what type of content to produce, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But the competition for content is fierce. 75% of online marketers say that their top challenge is creating enough quality content.
It is a lot easier to sell what people are looking for than to create demand for a new type of product or service. That takes a lot of money.
Smart marketers therefore seek to research what people are already looking for and create solutions for those needs.
It’s a tough situation, but not impossible! One of the ways to identify the content that people are looking for is to use one of the many keyword research tools available on the web. These tools generally give you many options but you need to choose the most relevant and appropriate terms to create content around. Examples are SEO MOZ , Semrush, and others. These tools often identify a range of keywords or phrases that people may use when searching for your type of goods or services. they may also indicate what the demand is for each of these terms and give an indication of the difficulty of creating content that will exceed the competition.
It is the marketers responsibility to choose the most relevant phrase to optimise the content for. Normally one would create a page for each term identified and make sure that it complies with the guidelines.
For instance if you’re trying to promote a guest house in Dullstroom some of the keywords to consider may be:
“Accommodation in Dullstroom”
“Reservations in Dullstroom”
“Self Catering Accommodation in Dullstroom”
“Family Accommodation in Dullstroom”
“Fly fishing get aways in Dullstroom”
Choosing the right keyword phrase for optimisation
Now each of these terms has their own nuances. The first term is probably too broad because people may use that search term if they were trying to rent a house to live in permanently. And if you’re not offering self catering accommodation at your guest house the keyword phrase “Self Catering Accommodation in Dullstroom”is probably not relevant. “Reservations in Dullstroom” may apply to fly fishing or to a restaurant so that may not be targeted precisely at your target market.
So you may have to expand your search for appropriate keywords or keyword phrases to target. Primarily you would want to find out how many people are searching for your chosen keyword phrase and also take a view on how many of your competitors are targeting that keyword phrase as well. You would look to see what your competitors are promoting and wether you could produce better or more informative content because that may influence your success rate.
The search engines favour those that deliver relevant results for each keyword or keyword phrase.
That’s why research into relevant keywords is important.
Creating useful, relevant and compelling content
Content should be of high quality and add value to web users. A search engine needs to have a way to measure how good a particular page is at answering the searchers query — this used to be done with PageRank (and still sort of is). This implies that your website should contain content that is useful, relevant and usable.
In other words people want to read your page because they find it helpful and/or interesting. there are many other distractions that compete for users attention.
At The Online marketer we always say “It’s not about you and what you have to sell. It’s about your customer and the problem they have and how to help them solve that problem.”
In order to create content that’s relevant and compelling, you need to be aware of your audience and what they want. To know what your audience wants, you need to talk with them. If you can get early feedback from your customers, develop a relationship with them, and keep in touch with them consistently, you’ll be able to see what problems they’re having and where they’re going with their businesses.
Leveraging this information can help you make better content for your website. If you can figure out ways to solve the problems that are keeping people up at night, or ways to drive traffic to their websites—or both—you’ll have a great chance to succeed.
Popularity matters, not just in regular life but also in search results. This means if you write something relevant, people might link your work and it may boost your rank in search results. Search engines seek to establish and maintain the trust of users. To this end they take deliberate steps to weed out players in the industry who game their system. And there are no shortage of those people.
You should not include duplicate content, no matter how high quality it is, because it helps neither the consumer nor the search engine. This can hurt the overall impression of your site and lower its rank in search results. Google for instance seeks to deliver the earliest version of the content in it’s search results so copying content does not help.
Write for your users, not for search engines like Google!
What are the best practices in On-Page SEO?
On page Seo is practices that you can use on your site, to help increase its ranking on search engine results pages (serps).
Off-page Seo deals with techniques and approaches that do not take place on your site; they are external approaches and techniques used elsewhere on the web.
A lot of optimisation techniques that are in the short-term effective at manipulating Google are in the long term detrimental to your website’s visitors, your reputation and its traffic.
For every online business we need to consider some of the technical requirements that the search engines deal with. Although search engines do not tell us specifically which factors are part of their algorithm they from time to time issue guidelines to which marketers need to conform. many of these guidelines are issued prior to the search engines changing their algorithms. So in affect you may be designing your page content based on what the algorithm may be looking for in future.
The following is a list of considerations one needs to bear in mind. This list is not exhaustive and changes often.
- Is your website using a single url?
- Does your website have a ssl certificate?
- Are your WordPress visibility settings correct?
- Has your permalink structure been updated to include canonical url’s?
- Do you have a caching plugin to speed up your site?
- Do you have a sitemap and is this submitted to search engines?
- Does your website have any broken links because this affects the user experience?
- Have you taken advantage of website schema when creating content?
- Has your site been optimised for mobile use?
- Have you implemented Image optimisation?
- Do your pages have a proper h tag construction?
- Are your Meta descriptions up to date and relevant?
- Ìs your website structure and navigation user friendly?
- Do your webpages load quickly and easily?
- Do you have text links to other parts of your website and to external sources?
At The Online Marketer we provide our clients with a SEO tool which allows them to score their efforts when adding new pages or blog posts to their site. This guide is very useful for assisting the website owner to evaluate whether they are getting their onsite optimisation correct. We recommend Rankmath Premium as the best available optimisation tool.
What are the best practices in Off-Page SEO?
First of all let’s look at what Off Page SEO is. Off page SEO is any tactics and efforts that one may make off your website that assists on building your brand or reputation that takes place off your website. So typically this may include public relations, link building, social media efforts such as posts video’s and images, podcasts, local SEO, events, reviews, content marketing etc. Essentially these tactics and efforts serve to build your community and therefore your perceived authority as a business or as a person.
Of all these efforts the most important is probably link building because that carries a lot of weight with search engines. It is undoubtedly one of the top three factors on Google for instance. Google likes to know what other people think of you. And Google wants your linking strategy to look natural and generic. So one of the ways they do this is to look at how these links are structured.
Backlinks structure
Lets try to understand back links. Essentially back links are links to your website or to a page on your website. It is now important to determine the difference between the types of links that exist.
We determine the type of link by the anchor text that is used in the link.
The first type of links are brand or corporate links. These links typically would consist of your company name or be a link to one of your brands or products. In our case an example would be “Visit The Online Marketer to see our list of services” This is a link to the company.
The second type of links are generic links. These typically say some thing like “To get The Online Marketers free eBook on the 8 Most common mistakes internet marketers make click here“
The third type of link is a targeted link. These are links where your anchor text is the same as the key words you have identified to drive traffic to that particular webpage on your site. An example would be “ A recent and exciting development is the creation of the Google authorship programme where Google recognises you as a content creator and rewards you with your photograph in the SERPS when your posts are indexed.”
So Google wants to see a mixture of these types of links. In the past they gave more credence to targeted links but this is no longer the case. In fact that may work against you. So getting links is important and probably the most difficult. We address how to do this an another post sometime in the future.
Social media
Social Media indicators are a big influencer for search engines. Authority will depend on how many followers you have and what sort of engagment you have. With the plethora of options open to us all it’s probably a good idea to concentrate on a few options and build your community that way. You cannot be all things to all people without a sizeable budget. Choose the social media that aligns with your brand to starts is our advice.
Podcasts
If you have something to say then podcasts are a lot easier to do than you may expect. In the post Covid age we are used to zoom meetings and this is a great way to create content. Find a buddy or industry role players and engage with them on a recorded Zoom type meeting. This can be the basis for for multiple format content such as video’s (for your Youtube Channel), Podcasts with the visuals stripped out and if you get a clever transcriber they can help you turn them into blog posts. thats three pieces of contebnt created with one conversation.
What will people like to hear? Set up a schedule of conversations and bang you’re on your way.
Off Page SEO is about building your tribe, your community, your support base. It’s about building authority. And it can be fun.
How do you know if your SEO campaign is working?
What you cannot measure you cannot manage. Thats a fact. At The Online Marketer we track changes in your website’s visibility, number of visitors, duration of visits and actions taken on the site. This informs us on the progress made and alerts us if we need to make further tweaks to get your search engine rankings higher. SEO is no quick fix and it’s super competitive. Travelling up the search rankings is a rewarding process. Your supplementary expenses such as paid campaigns costs decline as you achieve success and finally you should get generic traffic. If there is demand for your type of service the rewards are considerable if you get it right.
The Next Steps for SEO packages
At The Online Marketer, we believe in the power of the creative entrepreneur. We’re an all-in-one creative agency that offers everything you need to plan, create, publish, and promote your content—from websites to social media to magazines to books.
At The Online Marketer we offer tools and packages to help you get this basic building block on point. There is no better investment in your future online success.
Digitally First But Physically Enhanced
The swing to digital businesses should be supported by a physical presence. Even if that physical presence takes a new form.