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You will continue to pay for your domain name, but the website won’t do you any good, because you are unable to practice SEO and make your website visible enough for Google to recognize it and give it a good rank. You can either hire a Chicago SEO expert, or continue to make sense of SEO and implement it yourself.
Make Sense Of SEO
The basic definition of SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is that it increases the likelihood of the name of your website, appearing in the search results of different search engines. This depends on multiple factors, like the content that you have chosen for your website, the quality of that content and how effective is all of that.A Quick Guide
There are about 200 signals used by Google, to determine search results and SEO uses technical and innovative activities to influence these signals. Google wants its users to benefit from the best pages that it has, which is why every business should make their web pages more relevant and authentic. You should not include information that is false and not double checked or supported by credible sources, because that would give you a bad ranking and reputation.
The job of SEO is to find out whether a website can be accessed, it fulfills the technical requirements of a web page, it uses words that people usually search for and if it gives users a good experience, when they open the web pages. It also tries to find out if the content posted by the web developers is of quality or not.
If you think that you post bad quality content on your website, and Google won’t notice, then know that Google has a large team that overlooks this matter. Google has developed an algorithm, in which the quality of search results is fed and then the team knows whether the content is just a bunch of keywords or useful information.
On-Site And Off-Site
There is on-site SEO, which means SEO activities which are carried on the website. These activities include:Keyword: SEO experts have to search for keywords that are used frequently by businesses’ prospective and existing customers.
Auditing: If you are an SEO expert, you need to make sure that your website is indexed, is geo-targeted property and doesn’t put any barriers in front of the user, when tries to open a web page.
Optimization: SEO experts should improve the structure of a website, by focusing on internal navigation, page alignment and making the content of the web pages, more relevant.
Experience: The content that is posted on the web pages, should show authority and trust. This means that if someone has opened your website, then they are trusting you would have reliable information for them. You can use this trust to compete against your competitor, but one false piece of information, can easily ruin the reputation that ou have built over the years.
Off-Site Off-Site is when you try to make your website more visible, organically and through SEO activities. This off-site SEO is also known as link building, which means that you try to increase the number of links that can be traced back to your website, on other websites. This is done particularly because it raises trust among customers and also, search engines like Google.
These activities are:
Content Marketing – A good website will provide a link to your website, if it is sure that your web pages contain quality content and can be beneficial and helpful for readers. You should include stuff that would really attract readers like graphics, images, info graphics and videos.Digital – When you carry out digital PR, it makes other websites talk about you and include a link on their website, of your web pages. This usually means writing for other, researching, carrying out expert interviews and product placement.
Promotion – You can promote your website by talking to bloggers, who would be willing to blog about your products and services, with influencers, who can influence other people to visit your website an even journalists, who are willing to give a fair opinion about your business.
Even though there is a lot of information on the internet about SEO marketing, there are marketers who are new to this concept, and may not understand how to use SEO effectively. Thus, a company needs to find a Chicago SEO expert, who can solve these problems of the company. If the company doesn’t agree, because let’s face it, which company would like to spend on an SEO expert and increase their expenses, the company needs to be briefed about the benefits they can derive from such a recruitment.
Benefits Of SEO
1. Informed customers-When customers of a business use the search engine to find out about a product that they need and make an informed decision, a site ranking high because of SEO makes it possible for your customers to become more educated. They land on your website, get the content that they want and this builds trust as well.
2. Purchasing Decisions-You might not believe this, but SEO does influence our purchasing decisions. When customers develop a feeling of trust towards a business, they feel that they should buy from you because you are credible. This increases your conversion rate and even profits your business.
3. Brand awareness-There is no doubt that SEO gives more exposure to your business and makes potential customers and existing customers, more aware about your business as well. Awareness of your products and services is important, because it actually gets a customer thinking about whether they need the product you sell or not.
4. Attribution-As customers see the name of your brand or business frequently, it increases your attribution points and that is all because of SEO. Attribution, here, means the number of times that customers see the name of your brand. If they see your name frequently, then they get curious about what you have to offer and they even form the impression that your brand is a successful one.
5. Pay-Per-Click-It has been found out that unlike PPC, SEO receives more attention. SEO is better than advertising because many search engines skip paid advertisements. This is mainly because Google doesn’t trust PPC and if you invest in SEO, then you can get more traffic.
6. Website Referrals-If you adopt SEO effectively, then the number of people who refer your website to others will increase. The traffic on your website will increase due to website referrals and that will grow your online presence, making you more visible.
7. Measurable-Unlike other methods, SEO is measurable; you can find out whether SEO is working or not, by seeing your bounce rate and conversion rate, along with the organic traffic you receive.
8. Cost Effective-It doesn’t cost you to use SEO, but you have to put it a lot of effort and thought into it. You can’t just decide to use SEO, write a few articles with a few keywords, sit aside and then wait for things to happen on their own. This is like a constant battle.
9. New Markets-When your website gains exposure, you might be able to enter new markets as well, as you will have access to a larger customer pool. For example, if you are selling books online to individuals, then SEO can expose your website to educational institutions, who might want to buy books from you as well.
10. Social Media-When you share your content on social media websites, and keep updating your customers there, then the number of people who follow you on social media will increase as well. However, you have to stay active and run your SEO campaign effectively to increase the number of visitors to your web pages.
SEO Expert
• Understand the marketing objectives that the client has set, this includes the position that they want in the industry, their business niche, details about their products and services and brand attributes.
• Use elements of SEO like H-tags, images, proper formatting and organize the content of the website; make sure that you integrate keywords, key phrases, stem keywords and synonyms.
• Find out the keywords that are appropriate for your client’s business, develop a strategy that incorporates keyword targeting, find out how to include long-tailed keywords and phrases and use keywords that will bring profitability for the business .
• There are individual webpages within a website, and you should assign keywords to each web page. The planning and execution of keywords, should be done perfectly, so that it doesn’t bring out any problems .
• Try to get a good Google ranking and you can achieve this through the keywords on your home page, landing pages, published articles and blogs.
• You should focus on the experience that a user will get, when they visit your website. Make sure that the website has good quality content, is working and doesn’t load slow. Try to decrease the number of users who abandon a page, as soon as they open it, increase the number of page views, visitors and click through rates in SERPs.
• If the web pages of a website are giving errors like the 404 error, then you, as an SEO content expert need to fix it.You can’t leave such errors, because they impact the reputation of the website and the business. Also, make sure that there is no repeated content, missing content, and the structure of the URL is good.
• You should have the ability to run a website audit. This means that you have to test the website in terms of its visibility and the issues that it faces. For this, you should first check the Google Indexing Status, how efficient your programming language is, statistics of the traffic that you receive on your website and keyword targeting.
• You should keep yourself up-to-date on the latest happenings in the SEO world; as in what are the new rules of posting content, the trends that are making waves and how content should not be turned into spam.
• You should develop a website that is SEO friendly, so that humans can easily search things on it and it is not just designed for the Google bots
Traits And Skills
• You should be able to communicate effectively with other people; for example, if you want the writer in your team to write articles for the website, but he doesn’t include the necessary keywords, then you can’t be mean to the writer. You need to communicate with politeness and make sure that the writer understand the kind of content that you want.
• You need to be sharp to understand what your competitors are doing. SEO is the new way to market products and services, and every company tries to get ahead of the other company in this aspect. You need to study the strategy of your competitors and must come up with better strategies that would give you a competitive edge over them.
• You should be able to know how to handle panic situations. For example, if one of the most important web pages suddenly stop working, you can’t panic. You need to quickly find out the main cause, fix it yourself or get someone else to fix it. If you panic, then you might worsen the problem and ruin the effort that you put into SEO marketing.
• You should always keep on learning about SEO marketing, because the terms and conditions of SEO continuously change and new stuff comes in all the time. For example, previously, Google ranking only focused on the website aspect of a business, but they now want businesses to develop their websites in a way, that they can work on mobile as well.if your website doesn’t load quick on cell phone, then Google will give it a bad ranking.
• You should have the ability to know and engage with your audience. Try to work on your personality and make it charismatic enough for the people to engage with you. If you know your audience, then you will know how to communicate with them better and what they would like to read about. For example, if your target audience is over 65 years old, then you need to work on your website and make it user friendly and easy to access and navigate. This is because people who are above 65 years old, are not tech savvy much.
• You should know how to manage tasks, time and schedule. Try to delegate stuff, so that your job responsibilities don’t overlap too much.You can make a calendar and on that calendar, you should pen down the SEO related tasks that you have to do every day. This will also give you a perspective about how prepared are you to promote your business.
• Give yourself some space; this means that even though you have to develop content and look after many things, it is important to take a breather every now and then, and get away from the complicated stuff. You need to learn how to use your time efficiently, so that you don’t work long, but hard enough to succeed.
Why An SEO Expert?
• You should put in mind the above mentioned skills, traits and job responsibilities, before you hire an SEO expert. If you have already made an SEO expert part of your team, then you should try to assign them some work, to test their knowledge, skills and abilities.
• You should ask them to make SEO related recommendations, like provide consultation for the web pages that the company is using and ask for changes that the SEO expert will make, to give it more exposure.
• You should ask them for a content marketing strategy, that they will use in order to market the content of the company better, like raising awareness about the company’s products and services.
• Further, you should assign your SEO expert to develop your website. Ask them to run a test and see if the web pages are all working, if there are broken links or pages, if the content posted is not verified and if the format of the web pages, need to change because it might be too messy for the visitor.
• You should provide them with SEO tools and see if they have the ability to use those tools effectively or not
• You should ask them to work off-site SEO, so that it gives you a good ranking on Google and visitors are able to reach your website in a short time.
Sum It Up
Your content should be creative, unique, innovative and informative. If you include a lot of keywords in your content, just for the sake of getting a good Google ranking, then know that your efforts will go to waste. This is because visitors need information and quality content and when they don’t get that, then they will obviously rank your website not high up there, but lower.
You should definitely include keywords in your content, but make sure that these keywords are relevant so that when Google picks up these keywords, then that increases the traffic on you website. Otherwise, all your effort and time that you have put in SEO, will go to waste.
Lastly, hiring Chicago SEO content expert is not a bad thing. You should hire an expert, who can help you make sense of your website and give it more exposure. This will make your business more successful and lucrative and you will thank SEO.