How to Use SEO for Your Site in 5 Easy Steps

Why SEO is so Powerful

As a marketing and communication agency, we often get questioned about SEO and how it can really impact your business, here you'll find easy steps to follow to get as many visitors soon as possible. 

Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that involves increasing the visibility of a website on search engine results pages. SEO is used to increase website traffic by providing content that satisfies the needs of internet users and meets the criteria for inclusion in search engine indexes. In other words, how does your website ranks when someone searches for your name or your services.

High organic rankings in search engines require expertise, resources, and time. As a result, businesses are often faced with whether they should invest their time and money into SEO or other forms of digital marketing. But you already guessed what we would recommend you to focus on!

Search engines use algorithms to determine how well websites rank on their search results pages. The algorithms look at hundreds of factors when determining rankings, including relevance, authority, trustworthiness, and popularity.

We believe SEO is more critical than ever. It has become the single most crucial marketing strategy for businesses. It brings directly hot leads to you when your business developer may lose time qualifying leads and go through challenging conversations. We have already helped companies exceed their business development goals by relying only on SEO! Can you believe it?

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Step 1: Get internally organized!

Even if we're a digital marketing agency, we are as well entrepreneurs: meaning, we know how you run your business internally as well. (We have the same problems no worries).

There are many SEO benefits. One of them is bringing directly to you your ideal client. You must publish adapted and personalized content for a specific target to perform effectively on Google (following its last update). Meaning: to rank on Google, you must seduce your target by truly understanding their needs, their pain points, their questions, their personality, and their language. Trickier than you imagined, maybe, right?

So, the true step 1 will be only strategy:

• Internally, you must be clear on your business development strategy: Do you want only to sell a product, or do you want to get awareness first?
• If your goal is to sell, which services or products do you want to sell more?
• How many clients are you capable of onboard?
• Where does your ideal client come from?
• Who will take care of the lead when it comes to you?
• (We gathered everything in our Brand Review article) ‍

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You may think that this is absolutely not related to SEO, but mainly to your business's organizations, but yes, it is linked! SEO, when done well, can quickly bring a lot of new leads, and you must have the structure to welcome them properly! Once those questions are figured out, we can start to work!

Step 2: Who is your target? And how should you speak to them?

We keep repeating the same thing, but your audience should guide all of your marketing strategies and materials. You must, again, internally decide which group of people you want to focus on. Then, extract that group of people from the rest of the world and pay attention to everything they do. What do they love and hate, need to be reassured or guided, need as much information as possible or a quick solution to their problems... You only know.

Because your audience speaks a specific language, you must learn it! For example, if your primary target is Millennials, you can't write using old-school and boring words; you must be original, catchy, and a bit funny. The same goes the other way around; if your target is older, corporate companies, you may need to be more reassuring and convincing! They won't type the exact keywords on Google, directly impacting your monthly ranking and visits. 

So, make sure to be empathetic! 

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Step 3: Optimizing your website 

To get back to SEO: You have the static part of your website: your home page, article page, services pages, and an about us page, but you also have to publish fresh content to keep performing on Google in your blog, as well as regularly optimize the content of your static pages! 

Keywords and their placement are key factors. If you don't stick to the logic of Google and its robots, you may lose your audience. For example, using broad keywords in your H1, explaining what you do with specific keywords in your H3… No worries, we already covered it here.

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There are two main ways how to optimize content: 

• On-page includes the HTML tags you put on your website (meta title, meta descriptions, keywords, etc.)
• Off-page optimization includes the links you establish with other websites and blogs through social networking or link-building strategies like guest blogging.

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On-page SEO is everything you do to build the most robust foundations: the way you code your website, what we call "clean code." Is the weight of your page reduced to the maximum? Images, videos, lazy load tag, etc. Is your copywriting optimized? Are your tags set up? Did you use animations with a light hand, or did you trigger all of your elements? 

Off-page optimization is how your website behaves outside your website: how many robust websites refer to yours, how many people mention it on a forum, blogs, journals, articles, etc. Are your Google Reviews high, too high (fake), or too low? Etc. 

There are a lot of SEO tools available to help you with your optimization run: Google Analytics, Search Console, and Semrush, to give you a larger picture of your market. This will help ensure that your website complies with Google's current guidelines.

To sum up: Google is pretty easy to understand because it's based on human logic: if you look good, if you're clear, if you're readable, and if others speak about you, you must be a reference so Google will rank higher your website. If one goes without the second one, it just says to Google that you're less "famous." That's why we could build the best-looking website ever, but if you don't update it (following new trends and new needs) and work on a net linking strategy, you won't keep for a long time your number one position.

Step 4: Create Valuable Content as often as possible

Content optimization is the practice of ensuring that content is relevant and attractive to search engines. Therefore, content optimization is crucial for achieving high rankings in SERP in today's digital world.

First, you must study your market with a tool like Semrush and understand who is your main competitor from Google's perspective. For example, we may think that Nike's competitor is Adidas, right? But Google may not see it that way. For example, Nike's main competitor will be a trendy shoe reseller or a fashion marketplace. 

After studying your position, you'll have plenty of ideas for new blog posts to write! Again, a tool like Semrush will tell you how hard it will be to rank and what kind of content you'll need to publish! We do it as well for you, no worries.

When creating content, we often question ourselves: what does my target really want, and what will be attractive? We noticed that precise and easy articles are the best at the beginning for you to write and for your visitor to consume! ‍

If you need a few recommendations still, here it is:

• To perform quickly, it is best to publish at least 1 article daily. The more you can, the better it is!
• When writing an essay, think of one problem and one solution.
• Try to write at least 1500 words per article.
• Be yourself when writing! Be funny, human, and authentic.
• Diversify your word content with pictures, gifs, and infographics. 
• Be straightforward.
• Clarify your wording, and don't overused complex keywords.
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Step 5: Social Media Marketing - Follow Google's logic.

Social media marketing is a powerful way to promote your website and build your online presence. It's essential to know the best practices for social media marketing, so you don't get penalized by Google for spamming or violating their guidelines. For example, Google has recently updated its Adsense publisher rule, which now requires publishers to have at least 10,000 visitors per month to be eligible for AdSense revenue.

You can diversify your online presence by posting valuable videos on Youtube, (because it's part of Google) and extend your visibility by being active on Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms. You never really know where your next buyer or client may come from; that's why it's always better to be everywhere. We know it's challenging, but we just ask you to plant a seed, not a whole tree! 

Conclusion

As you can see, SEO is not 'that' hard. You'll soon see some results by following some steps and thinking strategically. Always focus on your audience first and what they really need. Be patient as well, and be ready to change your direction quickly. A great SEO strategy has to be flexible; when you'll see your first results, one article performing more than another one, you'll discover in which direction you should continue. We're also always available to help you with your goals!

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Cheers!