If you want to run a successful business in the modern world, it’s clear to see that you need to have a good grasp of search engine optimization or SEO. SEO strategy is absolutely vital, helping to boost a business up the rankings of Google’s search engine results, thereby getting more eyes on your brand, more clicks on your site, and more purchases of your products and services too.
However, SEO can seem quite challenging when you’re first starting out, especially if you’re running a student startup on a very limited budget. This guide will go over some top tips to help you develop a sound SEO strategy without needing to invest too much time or money into the process, allowing your brand to grow and evolve with ease.
Make High-Quality Content
Some people who are just getting started with SEO make the mistake of thinking that all you need to do is fill a blog post or article with a bunch of keywords and leave it at that, but the quality of your content makes a big difference too.
High-quality content can massively help with Google rankings, as Google’s algorithm does take quality into account. Well-written texts can also help you rank more highly for long-tail keywords, and they’ll actually be more useful for your users too, encouraging them to stick around and read more, thereby reducing your bounce rate.
Make Sure You’re Mobile-Friendly
Another top tip for boosting your SEO capabilities is to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly and works well across all common mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Your pages need to be able to load successfully and without any issues on smartphones and tablets. Otherwise, you may pay the price.
Google has recently been updating its algorithms to punish sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, and it’s clear to see that in this day and age, more people than ever before are relying on their phones to use the internet, so you have to be able to cater to their needs and expectations.
Speed it Up
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re running, whether it’s a new food delivery service for your local area, a video game sales site, a marketing business, or essaymama, you have to make sure that your pages are able to load quickly and efficiently for your users.
We all know that speed is important, but what you might not know is that it directly affects your SEO potential too. Google has recently begun putting a huge amount of emphasis on page speed and raising the rankings of sites that load quickly. There are several ways you can boost site speed, such as cleaning up your code, making sure you’ve got good servers, and using a variety of plugins and tools to compress your images.
Set Out Your Goals and Build a Strategy to Match
Another useful tip for making sure your SEO is on point for your student startup is to actually take the time to think about your goals and identify what you want out of your SEO strategy.
Do you purely just want to get a lot of clicks on your site? Do you want to make sales? Are you interested in getting more signups? Do you cater to a local, national, or global audience? By answering these questions, you can start to develop SEO tactics that match your aims. For example, if you’re looking for local business, you’ll want to focus on “near me” and “in my area” keywords.
Always Be Analyzing
One of the golden rules for effective SEO campaigns is to analyze them and learn as much as you can from them. Don’t simply launch a campaign and then sit back, expecting the clicks and buys to roll in. You have to actually monitor how effective your efforts are being.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to help with this. You can set up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and so on in order to track the metrics you’re interested in and figure out what’s going well and what areas may need improvement.
Make the Most of Every Part of the Page
Another key for effective SEO is to be as efficient as possible, and this means that you shouldn’t just focus on the main body content of your pages and posts; you should look at every possible piece of text connected to your web pages and use all of those little pieces as much as you can.
This includes headings, title tags, meta descriptions, URL structures, internal links, outbound links, social media metadata, and of course the main body copy too. You can use keywords in all of these areas, and they all have different levels of value and importance to take into account.
Author Bio:
John Peterson is a journalist and writer with 4 years of experience working at the London magazine “Shop&buy” and the website ninjaessay. He is a professional mini-tennis player and he has written a novel entitled “His Heart”. You can find him on Facebook.
