In this article we look at why it is important to be first on search engines with your website or eCommerce.
SEO strategy is critical to making your business visible. Good search engine ranking ensures visibility and Business.
Dear Entrepreneur I decided to write this article to give you some good tools to check your SEO and Web Marketing Strategy.
This will allow you to decide whether to improve your Company’s ranking on Google and other search engines.
You probably typed some of these keywords into Google:
- first place on google
- be first on google
- search results page
- first places on search engines
First on search engines: why it matters
I am writing to you as an Entrepreneur who, like you, invests energy, money and sacrifices in his own business.
I premise that SEO optimization and SEO strategy are infinitely improvable.
What we must not do is to get carried away, otherwise it becomes a demon.
On the other hand, if they are nonexistent or precarious, it is a big problem.
It is not important whether you spent thousands to make your website, or your e-commerce.
If an SEO search engine optimization strategy has not been planned, the real risk is that the site will not be properly indexed by search engines.
If you do not have a presence on Google, and you are not in the top positions, your business can run into serious problems.
It would be like making a beautiful brochure, or a wonderful catalog, and then deciding to lock them in a drawer.
I have divided this article into 2 basic chapters starting with the basic principles and ending with some technical insights.
It is important that I tell you from the outset that it is all commensurate with the budget invested.
Before going into detail, I want to answer an extremely important question:
Being first in search engines: is it essential?
The answer is no. It depends on what strategy you want to adopt.
Thanks to SEO you can gradually grow the visibility of your website in Google, the main search engine.
This type of traffic is called “Organic Traffic“.
It requires considerable time and effort, as you will read in the following points.
Otherwise, you may decide to implement a strategy focused on the use of ADV campaigns. That is, advertising campaigns through Google ADS, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Thanks to ADV Campaigns, your site and your products and services are immediately visible.
Beware that ADV Campaigns also require large budgets and the day you “turn them off” you automatically disappear from the search engine.
The Goal would be to use both tools.
On the one hand, the SEO strategy that allows you to grow progressively on the web.
On the other, ADV Campaigns that allow you to acquire, right away, Leads and Customers.
And now let’s see the first understood.
First on search engines: 8 Fundamentals
1) Produce valuable content
I personally place this item at the top of this list.
Clearly it depends on the strategy you want to adopt. Making valuable content requires commitment, effort and budget. It is not only successful but useful to the user.
Let’s start with a fundamental point.
Google is a company that derives maximum profits from its search engine.
Google’s goal is to give the most comprehensive, useful, and relevant answer to searches made by users.
To do this, Google has set up an algorithm that analyzes billions of pages posted on the Web, categorizing them according to a number of parameters.
If we were not to find the answers to our searches we would stop using Google.
All of us, when we go to the Web, are looking for answers. We need to satisfy a need: a restaurant, the new grass cutter, the village to spend the vacation, the new accounting software.
We enter a set of keywords (keyword research) and then decide which content to read.
If the content we read is detailed, interesting, useful and relevant, we are enticed to return to that website again. And, perhaps, we even decide to subscribe to their newsletter.
Otherwise, if what we have found is unclear, does not delve deeper into the topic, and does not solve our problem, we leave the page within seconds.
We will later see that, thanks to some free Google tools, it is possible to understand user behavior and thus find out whether, our content is interesting, or not.
If you are particularly interested in, delving into the topic related to creating valuable content, I invite you to read “Inbound Marketing Strategy“.
2) SEO Analysis of Competitors
Before setting our Marketing and SEO strategy, it is essential to know how our Competitors are positioned online.
The analysis should be done for both the website or e-commerce and Social channels. Today we look at the first point.
The goal of the analysis is to understand how competitors’ sites are positioned on the web.
Not only those we have known directly for quite some time.
It is crucial to understand if there are companies we don’t know that are ranked better than us.
Maybe they were irrelevant competitors who, with a good seo strategy, gained a good Google ranking.
Better to find out now.
By analyzing competitors’ sites we find out what keywords(keywords) they are positioned for. We understand their strategy. We decide where and how to “fight them” from an SEO ranking perspective.
3) Build your Buyer Personas.
I mention only this point even though it is crucial.
We assume that we cannot sell everything to everyone.
Thanks to the buyer persona you decide who your ideal customer is. Who you want to enter your restaurant, who you want to use your software to whom you want to sell your products.
Realizing one’s buyer persona is critical to defining one’s company’s positioning strategy.
If you want to learn more about this important topic, I recommend you read: “Buyer Persona“.
4) Keywords Tree
Once we understand how our competitors are positioned on the web we implement the SEO strategy, which involves, as the first point, how we want to position ourselves.
Basically: what are the keywords we want to use for our website.
For this reason, theKeyword Tree is made, which indicates, like a real tree, the main keyword (the trunk) the secondary ones (the branches) and the Long tail keywords, long tail keywords” (the leaves).
I won’t go into technicalities, if you want to explore this topic further, I invite you to read this article “keyword research: keyword tree“
5) Navigation shaft
The navigation tree of your site, tells the user and Google, what you consider important and mirrors the keywords tree.
6) Local SEO
If your business is purely local, then it is essential to set up a strategy called Local SEO which aims to position your company in the local area.
If you have a restaurant, a gym, a professional studio local SEO is essential.
7) Mobile site
It is critical that the site is also properly navigable from cell phones and smartphones. Desktop/mobile rates vary greatly depending on the industry in which our company is positioned.
For example, in B2C (Business to Consumer) markets such as fashion, food, electronics, etc., browsing is mainly from mobile.
In B2B (Business to Business) markets such as mechanics, business services, etc., browsing from mobile stands at 30 to 50 percent of the total.
8) Hosting
The seo hosting service is an extremely underrated point.
You invested a lot of money to make your new site. It’s beautiful.
You have unmarked all the items on this list, including hundreds of articles detailing your products and services.
But the user runs away from your site because it is slow. The loading time of a web page should be no more than 3 to 4 seconds.
It would be like buying a Ferrari and then not deciding to put gasoline in it.
Hosting is critical to the user experience of your site.
As you could see setting up an SEO strategy depends on so many factors.
I have tried to provide you with some useful elements to verify what you have accomplished to date.
Now let’s look at some tools for checking the work done.
Maybe you have outsourced your SEO strategy to your internal employee, or to an SEO consultant, or even, to an Agency such as Factory Communication.
First places search engines: how can I control my SEO strategy?
There are so many tools from the simplest and free ones to the most complex and paid ones.
Let’s start with the first one.
1) Why use Google Analytics
Installing Google Analytics on your site is simple, fast and free. I would add indispensable.
Thanks to Google Analytics you can get a lot of useful information such as, for example, traffic to your site.
There are so many parameters, I’ll point out the main ones:
- Pages viewed by users. Allows you to understand what topics are of interest to users
- Origin of traffic. Where are your users coming from? If yours is a local business and traffic is coming from all over Italy or abroad, there is probably something to improve.
- Bounce rate. It indicates how many users arrived at your site and then left without reading any more pages. It can be read in two different ways. The user found what they were looking for (Goal). The user did not find what they were looking for and decided to leave. (Problem). We can interpret the data according to the next parameter.
- Session duration. It indicates the average time the user stays on your site. If it is a few seconds and the bounce rate is high, it means there are big problems.
Clearly there are plenty of other parameters to analyze. My goal is to give you some values to find and interpret quickly to get a first rough idea.
2) Google Search console
Whether Analytics is installed on the vast majority of websites, Google Search Console is a lesser-known tool.
It is a free service from Google and is generally linked to Analytics.
Thanks to Search console you can control which Search queries (keywords) used by users to get to your website.
This way you can check if your SEO strategy is working the right way.
N.B. One of the first things you need to check is the sitemaps. They are extremely important.
With Google Search Console, you can tell Google about your site’s sitemaps.
There are several site maps in the sites: Pages, Articles, TAGs, Categories etc.
By telling Google the location of your sitemaps you are making their job easier.
You have a higher probability that your content will be properly indexed.
3) SemRush
Semrush is a paid service, but there is also a Free version.
By entering your website in the search field you can discover a bit of extremely useful information.
If you decide to use the paid version, a world opens up.
You can link Google Analytics and Google Search Console so you have a detailed and accurate overview of the data.
You can use the SEO Writing Assistant tool (I used it for this article) that assists you when writing your content, suggesting missing keywords, keyword density (Keyword density), which paragraphs are too long etc.
Beware because sometimes caught up in the heat of doing great SEO we can risk:
- inserting too many keywords: this activity is called keyword stuffing and can be penalizing;
- Cannibalizing keywords: occurs when multiple pages on the same website compete with each other to rank on the same keyword in search results.
First on search engines: conclusions
I hope I have provided you with useful information to evaluate your Company’s web ranking and decide to be first on the Google results page.
I would like to tell you that Factory Communication, to be first in search engines makes websites based on SEO Strategy and made on WordPress!
If you need further insight or advice, you can leave a comment.
I will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.
A fantastic Sunday
Want to find out how to improve the visibility and Business of your business through SEO and content marketing?
Don’t miss these articles: