Nowadays SEO matters the most for creating a successful brand as the competition gets stiffer in an ever-increasing online environment.
According to a recent study, one-third of consumers in the United States last year in 2018 began their online purchases primarily through leading search engine Google. The searches on Google had grown more than three times than those on other retailers’ sites or apps like Amazon.
This therefore indicates that brands need to devise a solid SEO strategy for gaining remarkable achievement in organic search results.
Is there a way out on how to become successful on the SEO front? What you need to know to achieve your goals? What is your current position? Where do you want to see your brand at next level? These and many other such questions need to be answered before creating your SEO strategy that helps to grow your brand and make it successful.
Here’s how to create the best strategy for your brand in 2019. Let’s take a look at the foundations or pillars on which your entire SEO strategy is based. These are vital for creating a robust SEO program for your B2B or B2C brand.
Crawlability and Visibility
You SEO foundation should be based on Crawlability. Your website should be searchable at all costs. It must be found by search engines and appear in search results. This is your first step towards engaging in effective SEO. The first task at hand should be to make your website accessible and visible to search engine crawlers. This task can be best done by your website’s robots.txt file, which is often neglected by retailers and brands. This little file acts wonders and is highly effective in providing instructions to crawlers telling the pages to be indexed or ignored.
The crawlers must be shown your website’s structure for better indexing. Your sitemap accordingly needs to be updated and expanded, or should be built from scratch. Your sitemap should include all the product pages, categories and subcategories. After robots.txt file has been updated, it should be submitted to Google and other search engines so that they can re-crawl your website as soon as possible.
Please note that you will have to face a bigger Crawlability challenge when using older plug-in technology like Flash or Silverlight for displaying content. If it’s so then it should be converted to a format for indexing like HTML5 or JavaScript.
Content Optimization
Your next SEO foundation should be based on Content Optimization. This is pertinent as the optimum use of your current assets can be done for improving your rank for specific keywords. An extensive list of target keywords based on volume and ROI can be prepared with the help of Google Keyword Planner. Your meta tags and content should be enhanced by making use of this list. This should be done starting from top-level pages, and then through categories and subcategories, and finally to product pages. Alternatively, you should focus on optimizing a few select pages in order to work through your entire website. This will also boost its performance.
Offsite Strategy
Pursue offsite SEO strategy through link-building and social influencer relationships. This is an important foundation for your SEO program. Begin your offsite work without waiting for existing content optimization. Link-building and influencer efforts help you derive more SEO benefits.
Research is needed for link-building. Before starting, it will be good for you to review link-building ethics and best practices of Google. If possible, make use of a tool like SEMrush which helps to identify where your competition’s backlinks originate. Prepare a list of high-quality websites with good traffic and strong social media presence for effective link-building. If you are able to get a 10 to 15 percent response rate then it’s good for your link-building campaigns.
Make extensive use of social media influencers and expand outreach to users to propagate about your product and brand. Reach out to high-profile, best-known influencers and ask them to talk about your product. However, micro-influencers are also great to work with as they are cost-effective.
Focus on Content Creation
Focusing on Content Creation at a whole new level is absolutely one of the best things in your SEO strategy. This will be highly effective with the companies which have matured or grown. The content should go beyond than just describing about the products and services. It should answer consumer queries related to the product being sold. Content creation should be based on topics with focus on keyword and competitor research.
We can now conclude that Crawlability and visibility, content optimization, offline strategy and content creation are the key to a robust SEO strategy and making your brand hugely successful in 2019.
