SEO Tips for Your Business
If you have ever taken an interest in increasing your businesses visibility, you are probably familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization, also referred to as SEO. SEO is the strategy and tactics that are implemented to help increase the visibility of a website or web page in both natural and organic searches. The goal of increasing your visibility is to connect prospect customers with your business and ultimately increase your client base. Although this is a goal that many business owners share, search engines -especially Google- have created algorisms that assist in bringing quality and reputable websites to the top of search listings, while pushing websites with insignificant importance to the bottom of search results. Over the past few years Google has implemented algorithm updates such as Panda and Penguin which are responsible for analyzing the quality of content and links while also combatting against spam. The most recent algorithm update called Hummingbird was implemented to refocus search results on keywords that are long-tailed and grammatical, which will ultimately allow searchers to search with sentences rather than keywords. With these algorithm adjustments in mind, let’s take a look at which tactics your business should implement.
A Shout Out To Citations:
Citations are mentions of your website or in layman’s terms a shout out to your business. If another group such as a charity, partnering business or blog mentions your business on one of their platforms, this will help the search engine to reaffirm the validity and the purpose of your business, in turn helping to increase your business’s visibility. A citation can be something as simple as mentioning a business’s name, displaying a logo or website URL, however including more detailed information about the business, such as an address and telephone number is the most effective way to integrate a citation. Including specific information about a business will help search engines match the ‘shout out’ to business’s website and platforms. Consider using the following strategies to increase the amount of citation’s your business has.
- Sponsorship Citation: Donate to a charity that posts sponsors on their website. Not only will your business be donating to a great cause, but this is an effective way to gain a citation and market your business.
- Associations & Organization Citations: Are you apart of any local or industry related groups? Many associations have a ‘find a doctor in your area’ page on their website. Be sure to submit your information to the associations or organizations that you belong to.
- Other Citations Include: Press releases, profile pages, image and video descriptions.
Additional SEO Strategies
- Develop a mobile friendly website: According to research “48% of mobile consumers start their purchase journey with paid and organic search results”. Ensure that your practice ranks high on mobile search results by creating a mobile friendly website that is easy for customers to navigate.
- Create and optimize your review site profiles: Google simply likes Google! In order to increase your visibility on Google, optimize and engage your following by posting on your Google+ Local page. Google also allows you to add categories, hours of operation and business information to this page, so be sure to add the correct information and make sure that this information is consistent across all of your platforms. Since these platforms will also allow you to add photos to your pages, be sure that the file name and caption are relevant to the photo and your business.
- Include plug-ins on your platforms: Add the “Share” plug-ins for your review site profiles and social media platforms on the homepage of your website. If a customer shares content that you posted on one of your platforms, this will help to increase the amount of links directing back to your platforms which will help in increasing your business’s visibility.
- Utilize social media: Create a Facebook and Twitter page for your business, and use these platforms to interact with your customer base. Facebook in particular allows you to add categories, sub-categories, a link to your website and additional information. Having links to your website from other reputable platforms is another strategy to consider implementing.
