As an online marketer, it is vital you get your head around the various concepts of search engine optimisation.
This is the most effective, long term solution to achieving great Google rankings. It’s also probably one of the most cost effective. But many companies are still opting for PPC campaigns instead. Although they can generate fast results, they are usually very expensive and not a great long term option.
If you rely totally on PPC, what happens when your budget runs dry? Your website will disappear from the search results and your traffic will dry up. And if there’s no traffic there won’t be any sales.
SEO is an investment. It may not give immediate results but, if you go about it the right way, it will over time produce great organic rankings with a constant stream of traffic.
The first step to achieving this is…
Keyword Research
This is vital – get this wrong and you won’t get the traffic you want. Keywords are the words and phrases people actually use when searching for your business.
Many companies get this wrong because they go for something too general. For example, copywriter in Google UK returns in the region of 7,500,000 results and is therefore a very competitive term. But, by going for a more regional term, such as Suffolk Copywriter (which returns 56,400 results) there is less competition and consequently more chance of you hitting the front page.
So it’s good to go local, especially to start with as this will be the quickest way to see results. Over time, with constant link building and content generation, you will begin to see rankings for other keywords, especially more general ones.
Just remember to be realistic about what you are aiming for.
Keyword Tools
There are many tools out there, but the most popular is Google’s Adwords tool. But, to get the most out of it, you have to learn how to use it effectively.
Recently I came across this post on dailybloggr.com – “Tips to Use Google’s Keyword Research Tool Effectively”. It’s great for helping you to understand how to find the optimum keywords for your industry to make sure you attract the right traffic to your website. After all thousands of visitors are only any good if they are actually looking for you. If you target the wrong keyword the only thing you’ll achieve is a high bounce rate – and that’s not a good thing.
Why not pop over there now and take a look and take the first step on your SEO journey.