SEO Matters: 5 Best Strategies To Grow Your Business

Imagine a perfect product in a physical store. It’s incredibly effective, quality, and long-lasting. On top of this, it’s 90% off at a discount, and even its full price wasn’t too high for the value you would be getting. Alas, it’s hidden on the back of the shelf, and to discover it, one would have to rummage through dozens of inferior products that are better placed.

This is what your online presence is like without SEO.

Your position in the SERPs is more than just visibility. It’s about authority and trustworthiness. Internet users believe that better-ranked sites are more credible (and they’re right). 

With all of that in mind, here are the top five SEO strategies that will help you grow your business.

1. Starting your SEO journey with on-site optimization

Your SEO efforts start with your site. Ideally, this is something that you should think of as early as naming your company, seeing as how a catchy name can turn into an amazing URL.

The reason why on-site optimization needs to be your starting point is mainly because all the roads lead back to your site. The main effort of all your off-site activity is to get people to visit your site, regardless of whether it’s social media promotion, link-building, or email marketing. 

Still, SEO rank is measured by more than just the number of visits. You also want people to stay a while (site visit duration), explore as much of your domain as they can (number of pages seen per visit), and interact with your site (conversion rate). Each of these metrics impacts your overall SEO rank.

Also, keep in mind that you’re making your site visible and navigable for both human and robot audiences. This is why you want to format everything properly. Start with your URL structure (something we’ve already mentioned), use proper meta descriptions and title tags, and adequately implement header tags to give everything you do a structure.

It’s also important that you establish a logical navigation process and a consistent internal linking structure. Both of these will encourage visitors to explore as much of your site as they can and interact with every element that you put in front of them.

One of the most important technical aspects you need to focus on is the page loading speed. People are generally impatient, and this goes double for people on the internet. 

2. Change the way you see keyword research

The first thing you need to do in order to figure this one out is try to understand how your customers see your business. Try roleplaying as a customer while bearing in mind that you might not be the perfect representative of your customer base. 

To make this simpler, you can turn it into a step-by-step process. First, start with seed keywords. These are the simplest terms that describe your business, your product, and your field of work in general. 

Next, use keyword research tools to figure out what kind of traffic and competition they have. Ideally, you’re looking for something with a lot of traffic and very little competition. This is not easy to find, but if you’re crafty enough, you’ll be able to do it.

The simplest way to reduce competitiveness would be to start using long-tail keywords. These are extended versions of a keyword, similar to the exact phrase (or approximate phrase) that a potential customer may use.

Local long-tail keywords are also quite popular. This is the type of keyword that includes the location. While Google’s algorithm has advanced so far that it accurately suggests businesses based on your physical location (tracking via GPS), people still use the location during their search. This is that extra step of local mobile optimization you desperately need.

One last thing you need to keep in mind is that, in 2024, voice search keyword research is just as important and it’s somewhat different than traditional keyword research. Namely, during voice search, people use more grammatical forms of keyword phrases. With more and more people using voice search, this is something worth paying attention to.

3. Increasing the quality and reliability of your content creation process

There’s a reason why we set apart quality and reliability. You see, quality alone is not enough; you also need a sufficient quantity. Even the best post won’t give you good enough results if it’s the only thing on the blog or if you post too infrequently.

Other than this, your off-page SEO (mainly link-building) requires vast quantities of content that has to be written and curated. Even if you heavily rely on AI generative content, you still need someone to format it, write all the prompts, heavily edit it, and ensure that it meets the standards of the blog.

Generally speaking, there are three ways to ensure that your content is both reliable and quality enough.

First, you could outsource this task to specialized content creation companies. This way, you’re getting original content that’s already SEO-optimized. Even more importantly, you get it in agreed quantities and at a set price. You either pay per word or per post, which is amazing for cost control.

Next, you could start your own in-house content team. While this is something that will give amazing results in the future, a lot of small blogs and companies can’t afford it. Veteran writers and great editors are not cheap and are hard to find.

Third, you could rely on guest posters for your own blog, but this doesn’t solve the issue of your link-building. Perhaps you could hire some of them as freelancers, but this is an ongoing process, which means that you need a bit more of a permanent solution. We also recommend using a payroll software geared towards content creators and freelancers.

Whichever you choose, it takes time for them to start giving results, so start sooner rather than later.

4. Adopt mobile-friendly SEO practices

You must acknowledge the fact that the majority of your visitors use mobile devices to browse your content, which means that whatever you do, you have to optimize for mobile. So, how does this work?

First, you need to prepare for local mobile optimization. People use mobile phones outdoors, and their current location will drastically impact their decision-making process and their bottom line. This is true even for offline purchases. It is believed that four out of five offline buyers do this after a brief local mobile search. 

Second, you need to make the site responsive. This means that it has to adapt to any screen size that your audience might use. This means testing for all screen sizes. 

You must also optimize content for mobile devices. You don’t want to cram too many clickable elements since it won’t be very touch-friendly. A minimalist layout works best here. Not only is it more practical, but it will also help you keep things simple and efficient on this end. 

When making a sitemap, make sure that it’s mobile. This way, search engines will have an easier time understanding the structure of your mobile content. As we’ve mentioned earlier, you’re making the site for both human and robot audiences. Even with the AI analytics, you still want to make it easier for crawlers to inspect and index your site.

Lastly, you might want to consider implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages. This will almost make your layout mobile-first and earn you a lot of favor with mobile users. Keep in mind that, in 2024, people expect their mobile browser to be just as fast as their desktop browser.

5. Never stop measuring the results

Ultimately, your work is never done.

The thing is that the algorithm gets updated on a regular basis. At the same time, with every update of the site (both platform and extensions that you’re using), there’s so much room for things to go wrong. Links get broken, new security concerns appear, and your page takes longer and longer to load.

Your content gets updated, and one of the ways to figure this out is to notice a drop in rank and traffic.

Sure, you could notice this passively, but you need to measure the results to see the problem before it becomes a serious bottleneck. 

With the help of tools, you can track the performance of your SEO campaign to check if you’re getting your money’s worth. Sure, SEO doesn’t give results as quickly as PPC, but the results are longer-lasting. With PPC, you see an immediate increase in traffic, but this is gone as soon as you stop paying. With organic SEO, the results will linger even if your effort drops.

Ultimately, you need to keep measuring and analyzing results for as long as you have an online presence.

SEO is a complex strategy that requires a multi-pronged approach 

Running a successful SEO campaign is a difficult task, but it’s not optional. If you want to grow your business, you must grow your online presence and position yourself next to the best. For this, you’ll need an elaborate SEO campaign. Now, you have an idea of how to conduct one.