Your website and blogs need SEO (search engine optimisation); end of story. If your content and website aren’t optimised for SEO, desktop and mobility, you’re wasting your time (and money). Even if you’re “just” a recipe-sharing blogger; if no one reads you, what’s the point?
Sharing Your Knowledge
It seems we can’t learn enough fast enough. That’s one of the reasons blogs are so popular. Sharing your knowledge and learning from each other has created a more open – perhaps even honest – culture.
If you’re a blogger writing about things you love without the intention of making money, you still want to engage or entertain visitors. A lot of bloggers start their blog as a hobby. They don’t focus on SEO at first and who could blame them? You want to write, not worry about Google and their unfathomable rules on how to rank.
Still, it would be nice to make enough money to at least cover the cost of running your website. For every reason you have to justify blogging, there are an equal number of reasons to justify SEO. There are a number of SEO optimisation websites out there, but it can be discouraging: Yoast SEO hates my writing style!
Social Media is Good, But . . .
Perhaps you have active Instagram® and Facebook® accounts with two-hundred followers or more. You want your readers to visit your blog through the links you share on your Facebook page, right? SMO (social media optimization) is important, too. You need to focus on your social media SEO as well!
Get to Know Your Visitors
Your readers are “fans” of your blog and without them, you don’t have an audience. To keep them engaged, get to know them. By learning more about your visitors/readers, you’ll also discover what drives them to your website, what retains them, what causes them to leave. You’ll then be able to write more relevant blog posts.
SEO is Motivational – for YOU
When you know how well you rank for certain keywords, you might find your most popular blog post is one you’ve written over a year ago. There might be a series hidden in that blog post upon which you can expand. Perhaps you’ll never suffer from writer’s block again!
Forget Word of Mouth
While off-page SEO is important, handing out your paper business cards probably won’t get you 1,000 visitors per month. Your mom may be your biggest fan, and she may tell 10 people a week to visit your blog, but don’t count on it. Word of mouth fails to capture the audience realised by SEO.
TEAM = Together Everyone Achieves More!
Cultivate companies that want to collaborate with you. These partners can increase your traffic from domain authority and page authority to social media.
SEO Brings Structure to Your Blog
To grow, your blog needs a clear structure. You wouldn’t be the first to end up with dozens of categories and hundreds of tags. Your users need a structured website to navigate, and Google uses this as well. Your website will become better by spending time on SEO.
Keywords
If you want to grow as a blogger, you need to know which keywords work best for your website. If you want to become an expert on a certain topic, here are some tips from How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide:
- Make a list of relevant topics – Come up with about 5-10 topics you think are important to your blog or business. These should be the topics you blog about most or answers to questions your customers ask.
- Under each topic, make another list of keywords – Your company sells cookware, or your blog is called “All Things Foodie.” Sample keywords might be: measuring cups, cooking, recipes. “The point of this step isn’t to come up with your final list of keyword phrases . . . you just want to end up with a brain dump of phrases you think potential customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket,” says Beginner’s Guide.
SEO Means Business
“Is SEO dead?” No, says Steve Olenski, but it’s evolving for businesses. Your company needs SEO more than ever, simply because “It still works.” It’s not going to stop working anytime soon.
Compared with other marketing tactics, paying for SEO is relatively inexpensive and the payoff can be measurable. And because of mobile devices, local search optimisation has resulted in businesses seeing greater website and walk-in traffic.
Your Competitors Are Using SEO
If you aren’t getting the most out of SEO, someone is. And that someone could put you out of business, completely because of an SEO competitive edge. If you wouldn’t try to insert a nail into a board without a hammer, then don’t try to ignore SEO. It’s one of the best tools your organisation can use.
Forbes shares reasons why you need SEO for your organisations’ website:
- Better close rates on outbound leads – SEO leads average 14.6% close rates (sales/revenue-generation) compared to 1.7% for outbound leads (responses based on email, other incentives).
- Increased brand credibility – If you are among the top-tier of search results, you’re viewed as a “key player.” If you’re 2 or 3 pages removed, assumptions might be you’re too new or unreliable.
- Increased percentages – Eighty-one percent of shoppers research online before going to a store. Page one visibility generates 71.33% of the clicks. Again, SEO boosts your rankings.
- Location, location, location – Your free placement (ranking) at or near the top of organic search results is SEO-generated. This leads to more traffic on your website.
- More leads – B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-customer), non-profit organisations, and marketing professionals reported SEO had become their number-one source of leads. The question is, if your website’s SEO is not generating leads, is your competitor’s?
- SEO is less work – Once you’ve put the plan in place, all you have to do is wait for greater lead generation. “Once you’ve laid the foundation of proper SEO optimisation for any given page, most of the hard work is done,” says Forbes.
- User experience – If your end users have difficulty navigating your website, you’ll lose them Quickly. A good user experience can generate more trust and increase brand loyalty.
