How can you go big with SEO?

Seeing big guns ranking in your niche can be overwhelming for anyone – especially if you are a time-strapped entrepreneur spread thinly on budget and staff. 

If you are not convinced about choosing SEO to expand your business, have a look at the following statistical search engine facts that weigh in your favor:

• Google is generous enough to give new sites a ranking boost to help them get started. 

• Google has received nearly 2.3 trillion searches this year. A small percentage of that number is still a decent size of organic traffic for small business owners. 

• 15% of daily searches are new to Google, and there is your search window to rank for a unique niche. 

• 55.24% of site pages have no backlinks, so even a few backlinks can surge your sales.

• 72% of shoppers who browsed a local search went to a store within a five-mile radius, ergo, local SEO is a promising investment.

• Google uses more than 200 factors to rank content, even if you are able to optimize a few factors, it will escalate your sales in the long run. 

Here is one reason why small businesses delay investing in SEO:

Google only prefers big B brands. 

On the bright side, with an internet market of trillions of users, you can have your fair share of organic sales leads. 

Now that is a fair fact considering the success of a legion of small scale businesses that took off after laying some SEO groundwork. 

To quote an example:

Texas Cryo Solutions is a cryo slimming company in Frisco that uses cryo skin 3.0 to provide slimming, cellulite, and facial treatments that keep your skin firm, well-hydrated, and safe from wrinkles. 

Boosting its online business came with a plethora of other challenges. For our team, Texas Cryo Solutions presented:

• A lack of brand awareness
• A fading online presence 
• An unclear brand identity 
• An outdated optimization of content
• A complicated user experience 

After drafting a custom SEO strategy to target its intended clientele, our team at Quipit Media was able to achieve the following data-driven results: 

• A 51% spike in revenue
• A 73% increase in organic traffic
• A 44% rise in contact form submission 
• A 38% improvement in conversion rate 

Using a similar SEO-driven approach that Cryoslimming has been using since its site’s launch, you can definitely give your business an organic boost too. 

Unlike newspaper ads and pamphlets, SEO is a reliable predictor of your site’s success. By the end of this blog, we plan to equip you with all the grounding techniques that will help you understand how SEO can promote your business.

Growth Markers of Site Success 

On-page Factors 

On-page factors or on-page SEO, as the name goes, is the face validity of your site. This includes visible elements like the architecture of your site, the content displayed, and HTML attributes.  

Content 

Needless to say, one of the most user-engaging chunks of your website will be your written and visual content. Content creation improves indexation rates by more than 434%. If your site is void of unnecessary ads and thin (sub-par) content, you have a high chance of creating a winning platform that will tempt potential leads. 

HTML 

HTML is responsible for making your site source code optimized. With HTML, you can create a sitemap that will make it easy for Google crawlers to home in on your site content. To cite a few SEO-friendly HTML considerations, you need to keep in mind the following pointers:

• HTML Title Tag – <title> – is text-only display of your article’s title. 
• HTML Meta Tag – <meta> – metadata is a keyword rich description of your title. 
• HTML Header Tage – <header> – the header tag represents all your H1 to H6 headers in your content. 

To cite one example, here is how the structural HTML tags look: 

*Note: You will only need to be acquainted with HTML tags when you need to revise your SEO strategy. To invite a broader audience, it is better to let a professional handle this portion.*

Architecture

The architecture of your site, otherwise known as a web layout or your site’s structure is the logical layout of information on your webpage that portrays your site’s anatomy. Some important factors that contribute to the overall SEO robustness of your site include: 

• Graphic Design – this includes attractive pictures, gifs, videos, etc. 
• Content Strategy – the management and placement of tangible media 
• Mobile Layout – the mobile version of your site 
• Cloaking – the content presented to a search engine spider 
• User Interface – how users can navigate your site 

To boil down the points above, here is how an optimized version of your site’s architecture looks like: 

Off-page Factors 

Link Building 

Inbound links also called backlinks / HTML links / external links. They are responsible for indicating other credible sites to search engines. 

For instance, if a ranking site interlinks their site content with a link to your site – they will be creating a pathway to your web address that will get you noticed by Google crawlers.

Building Trust 

In order to build your brand off-page, you need to show Google that your site is authentic and can be trusted to not conduct any shady business. To announce yourself as a secure site, you need to be wary of Google’s rulings on piracy and create an authorized brand identity that verifies your credibility. 

A good way of gaining reliability is to practice white hat SEO. To see what’s working, you can tweak around some off-page elements, but as off-page SEO grants gradual results, it can be frustrating at times for the site to gain momentum in generating revenue. 

Social Media Marketing

Google is big on zeroing on social signals.  A Facebook share, an Instagram follow or a twitter trend can do wonders for your site’s rank. The more crowd you can gather in your social media handles, the more your rank will improve in SERPs. This includes any and all shares, likes, views, and comments you can get. If people are talking positively about you, Google will definitely take notes. 

Influencer marketing and social media marketing is one of the most active on-page elements of SEO. It can give you a good boost overnight but since that depends on chance variance, ergo, SEO analysts prefer methods that can be predicted. 

To increase the spikes on your sales, you can pick up some basic SEO tips for your startup here. 

Questions To Ask Your SEO Agency 

Any time you feel like stepping up your SEO game from a small business to a ranking site, you will have to touch base with a professional SEO agency. 

By this stage, you need to learn to differentiate between an SEO Pro and an SEO rookie. To single out a competent team, you ought to be well informed about the question you will ask. 

Q. How can you improve our site?

This is an intended open question. It will allow you to assess the potential of SEO experts. To name a few SEO drivers, ask them about improvements in local SEO, on-page optimization, technical audits/fixes, keyword research, content optimization, and link building. 

Q. Do you follow all the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Many small businesses look past adopting SEO techniques for fear of getting a Google penalty. This is a ground where you need to get in touch with an SEO professional after following some basic SEO tips on your own. 

Apart from that, it shows that you are an informed buyer and it will put off many pseudo-SEO companies, which is exactly what you want. 

Q. What improvements can we expect on a monthly basis?

The quality of a monthly SEO report you will get more or less depends on your budgeting, but if you plan to invest in tracking progress, ask for reports on tracked keywords and the planned SEO strategy for the month along with its results. 

Q. How can you track our site’s success?

If you are planning to employ an SEO agency, the best way to know that they will get a job done well is to asl what metrices they will be using to track your site’s health performance. 

For a small business owner, you can’t expect much but you can measure the number of webpages that are getting organic traffic. 

Q. Do you have a minimum term or a contract? 

Depending on the marketing goals for your startup, you will be offered different packages according to your SEO needs. They could vary from a one-time investment to a long year-long contract. 

*Note: Be mindful about expecting quick results, if your site just got optimized, it will take a few months for crawlers and users to become acquainted with your online presence.*

Finally

Being a small business owner doesn’t mean you can’t be at subpar with the big boys. The key lies in setting realistic goals with your SEO analyst. Once you weigh the optimizing options applicable for your site, you can convert a fair sum of site visitors to customers.