SEO has been a part of our lives for almost two decades, ever since Google’s inception back in 1998.
We first used search engines for information, navigating the web for anything that would take a few minutes by opening an encyclopedia.
With time, smart entrepreneurs learnt how to use the internet and search engines in general to their advantage, making users aware of their activities and products/services.
With the advancement of the internet and online payment solutions such as Paypal, purchasing online has become a swift (and secure) process, with you punching in the relevant details, receiving a receipt and automate the entire process until you receive your parcel/service in the mail.
Many website owners seem to neglect the power of SEO in overall discovery and only lean on word to mouth to gain more following and clients.
If it works, that’s great but in putting a little more effort into SEO, you won’t even need word to mouth – clients can just come to you.
This problem isn’t only an issue among small time website owners; it could happen to companies in general.
Courtesy of Searchenginewatch.com
The trouble isn’t only with sponsored ads on search engines that take up the first few rankings and ergo dominate the day (especially on mobile, where people scroll down even less than on desktop), but fighting for ranking higher.
Good SEO is also knowing where your users are, since over 50% of searches are conducted on mobile devices according to Google so opt for mobile-friendliness when building your website (Google puts emphasis on Accelerated Mobile Pages since they display content faster).
Make sure you have good links on your website and you haven’t paid for links to “bad” websites that will ruin your reputation.
Offer good content on your website, using relevant keywords (use the keyword planner) to make sure you actually appear on search results.
Be sure to share your message across, especially on social media and opt for everyday use of it – Facebook and Twitter are fantastic and according to the website’s vertical – so are Instagram and Snapchat.
Don’t forget to submit your website for crawling at Google (search console), Bing, Yandex and Baidu:
Put the metatags at your header HTML for all your urls to make sure search engines actually start the indexing process; claim your site as soon as possible to ensure good ranking in the future.
Create a sitemap of all relevant urls to be crawled and start populating your site with information since day one.
Yes, good SEO also requires some paid ventures as well to get discovered at first, but the more good links that you would have, the better the content you have and using tools such as Google My Business, social media presence and overall getting your point across – could help you immensely without filing for bankruptcy on account of only paying for good ranking.