As the fight to stand out from your rivals continues to intensify, the need for businesses to boost their online visibility has never been greater.
Implementing SEO and PPC strategies has proved vital in building brand awareness, increasing traffic to their business and generating additional leads which have converted into extra custom.
With research showing that 91% of internet users use search engines to find information online, having a well-optimised website can make a significance difference in your online success.
ROAR Digital Marketing is a specialist Search Engine Marketing agency working with clients across Europe, and its team is sharing its top nine tips on how businesses can maximise their online visibility and boost their thought leadership.
Content is a foolproof way of increasing your online visibility and thought leadership. In line with the Google Helpful Content Update released in 2022, which prioritises content where users feel they’ve had a worthwhile experience, whilst content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations will not perform as well. Your content should be well-researched, informative, relevant, and audience-focused, providing a user with a great experience. By doing so, search engines like Google will recognise that your content provides value to a user and rank your website page higher on the search engine results page.
Now you’ve written your content that is well-researched, informative, relevant, and audience-focused, it’s time to ensure it is optimised correctly. Optimising your content means ensuring that it is written in a way that can reach the largest possible target audience. This is done by selecting a focus keyword or term your audience uses regularly online – you can discover these through keyword research. Then, this search term should be used throughout your content, in the title, meta description, and within the alt text of images. You should also include semantically-related keywords sparingly through your content which are words or phrases that are conceptually related to each other. It is also best practice to include both internal and external links within your content; internal links provide a user with a seamless journey through your website and external links show you’ve researched the topic you are covering.
Internal linking is a strategy used to connect pages of your website together through internal hyperlinks. This creates an intricate internal linking structure allowing each webpage to share ‘SEO juice’. This tactic can help push a specific webpage up the rankings, signalling to SEO bots that the webpage deserves to be higher up the search engine rankings. For example, say you wanted one of your services to rank high on search engine results pages. You could create supporting blog content that dissects the overall topic of your services page, with each blog hyperlinking to the webpage you wish to rank for a specific term. This would fuel the webpage’s authority and show search engine bots that this service page is the most relevant location for a user to go.
Keyword research is critical for any online business that wants to succeed and improve its online visibility. Keyword research is critical for discovering the keywords and search terms that your audience is using when searching for content, products or services related to yours. Each website page should be optimised for a different keyword(s), and the content should accurately reflect this and cover the search topic.
Schema markup is a language specifically designed for a search engine like Google. When utilised correctly, it helps a search engine read and understand your content more efficiently. By using Schema, you’re essentially telling a search engine what it’s reading and leaving out any guesswork, giving your page, blog post, article, video etc, the best possible chance to rank well online.
User experience is a strong ranking factor when it comes to SEO and online visibility. Search engines will penalise your website if it is hard to navigate, slow and has a large bounce rate. In order to improve your website user experience, amongst other tactics, you can utilise internal linking, use clear, concise messaging, and improve your website speed. By doing so, you create an easy-to-navigate website allowing your users to find key services, products and any information they are searching for. You want to ensure your website setup helps a user flow through the website and avoid any challenging hurdles.
Meet your new best friend – backlinks. Backlinks allow you to score vital online ranking points in the search engine Olympics. Backlinks are links that point to your website from another, and they are often a good indication of authority and thought leadership. Put it this way, the more backlinks your website has from relevant, high-domain authority, quality websites, the better. You can secure backlinks through HARO, guest posting, partnerships or digital PR. As part of the Google E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, digital PR contributes by earning coverage and backlinks through trusted third party publications. These pieces of coverage and backlinks that come from quality sites are clear indicators to search engines like Google that your website is trustworthy.
Meta titles and descriptions appear on search engines offering information about your website or webpage. The key here is to optimise them for your website’s chosen keyword and include an accurate description of the webpage’s contents. This helps search engine bots better understand your webpage and how they can determine its relevance to a user. The meta title and description play a huge role in persuading a user to choose to visit your website over another, amongst its relevance.
Case studies are a great tactic for boosting your thought leadership and showing expertise. They are vital when it comes to sharing previous work and results for clients. Case studies can show how your business tackles your clients’ challenges and allow you to speak about your speciality in your niche industry. They don’t necessarily directly contribute to your SEO or search engine-ranked website authority, but once a user lands on your website, these types of articles can be a great way to show why your business is the provider of choice in your sector.
ROAR Digital Marketing specialises in search engine marketing offering businesses the opportunity to increase their website traffic, leads and improve their online visibility through tailored results-driven strategies.
