Developing or changing your website can be a major act in professional life. And for that, you have to be good at SEO. It’s like buying a house: do I buy it empty or already equipped with home automation? But you can’t put home automation in half, you have to do it completely, and install:
- home automation box
- smart thermostat
- connected lighting
- electrical connected sockets
- automatic shutters
- connected smoke detector
- energy consumption sensor
- motion detector
- weather station
- vacuum cleaner
- refrigerators
- washing machines
The same goes for a new website. We do this work regularly at archiplain.
For your professional or personal site, you have to do it the same way.
You have to design your SEO compatible website.
This site should include features that will allow you to attract qualified traffic related to the products you offer.
SEO is therefore an essential tool in your desire to increase the web traffic that goes to your website.
Why use SEO for this?
In reality, all businesses use web marketers to improve the visibility of their web pages.
What are the reasons ?
For two main reasons. First, the vast majority of Internet users, over 90%, begin their investigations with a search on a search engine. And a sizeable majority trust a natural result more than an advertisement.
It is therefore necessary to be present on the search engines. Without them, we do not exist on the web.
What are the relevant search engines?
The idea is not to waste time in this natural referencing. From the moment Google is the most used search engine in the world. There is no need to spend time being listed on other search engines like Bing or Qwant. It is therefore a priority to be present on Google’s search pages.
How does SEO work?
First you have to understand how the Google search engine works. This is powerful software that navigates the web from clickable link to clickable link. Once inside a page, he puts it in some sort of library. When a user does a search on Google, the software does not search the results on the web. It does it in this library.
There are therefore two important things for SEO:
- Pages of the website must be visited by this Google software
- Ranking in the library must be done with a highest ranking possible
Indexing and SEO are therefore also important for your website. It means that there must be clickable links that point to the pages of your site. In addition, the content of your pages must be sufficiently interesting. Consequently you have a high ranking, with elements like a blog or relevant keywords.
SEO strategy
When designing your website, you need to think about implementing an SEO strategy.
Some things to think about regarding your desire to position your site in the first pages of Google:
Is your product local or national, even international? It changes everything. Indeed, what is the use of being listed in New York if your product is only available in San Francisco?
Is your SEO qualified? Indeed, it is not the same thing if only one person buys your product out of 1000 people who have visited the site, or if it is one in two people.
Qualifying your SEO will allow you to consider switching to paid or non-paid SEO (SEA versus SEO)
Be careful, paying $ 1000 for 1000 clicks and having a single buyer who pays for a product at $ 50 is $ 950 loss. It is better to sell more expensive products that exceed this cost of $ 1000, or to target SEO a lot more: $ 2 for two clicks and a sale at $ 50, it is much more interesting.
How to encourage Google to properly reference your site?
It is not easy because today there are more than 200 criteria in natural referencing. And the competition is doing the same thing as you. Imagine that you have managed to have a well-referenced TAG, for example the “New York real estate” TAG. When people type this expression, your site arrives on the first page of Google. Competitors can see that your site is on the first page with this expression. So they can include that phrase on the pages of their site, or they can buy that phrase from Google. Thus, each time a user types the expression “New York real estate”, an ad will appear on the Google page. It will divert a part of the customer base to them.
There is no ideal solution for your site. Either you decide to completely redo your site to integrate an SEO strategy, or you modify it in depth. In any case, if your website is poorly referenced, it must be changed in depth.
And don’t forget one thing: asking a service provider to redesign a website does not give you any guarantee that your website will be better referenced. I know of websites which are very well referenced, which have a lot of traffic, and which have been entirely made by their owner.
What are the essential elements for a good SEO strategy for your website?
Target your customers: If you sell real estate in Paterson or Clifton near New York, there is little point in describing it with words like “real estate” or “New York real estate”. It is better to describe your advertisements with the expressions “Paterson real estate” or “Clifton real estate”.
Be more flexible in the structure of your website. Thus, you can evolve it according to the different evolutionary strategies.
Be more rigorous in the constitution of your site: avoid pages that are too heavy, too aggressive with advertisements
Think about the general structure of your site, so that users don’t get lost, and think about links to social networks.
Think that your site must be mobile friendly, it must adapt to small screens. If you don’t know how to do it, know that WordPress is a mobile friendly website editor.
How to create your merchant website?
Customer identification
This is the first and probably the most important step. Know that the Japanese, when they want to design and sell a new product, first do a study of the market of the client country to know as much as possible these inhabitants and adapt its future product to this new market. It may happen that the Japanese manufacture a product perfectly suited to the USA and not at all to Japan.
These clients can be local, international, rich, poor, male, female, etc … Depending on the typology of the clients, SEO will adapt.
Create the site structure
For example, you can draw blocks on a sheet of paper to represent the skeleton of the site. Then you create pages, for example product pages. Do not forget the regulatory pages as the legal notices.
Create a blog
This is a place where you can write articles, news, which may interest your customers. The more interesting these articles are considered by your customers, the longer they will remain on your site, and they will transfer the link from the page to acquaintances. All this will increase the SEO of your site.
Introduced key elements of SEO
- Introduce relevant keywords so that people find your site
- Create HTML tags (code present in the pages but not necessarily visible by Internet users)
- Make meta descriptions
Introduce relevant titles
Make meaningful URLs: we prefer a URL like: http://website.com/realestateillinois rather than a URL that contains a succession of numbers.
Mobile friendly
Create your site with WordPress or ask the person who made the site to make it mobile friendly. This will prevent smartphone users from viewing your site in lowercase characters.
Page size
It is considered that it makes pages of at least 1000 words so that they are properly referenced.
Differentiate from the competition
This means making competitors differently while being well referenced by your future customers.
An example: do not try to systematically correct spelling or grammatical errors in your texts. Indeed, if only 1% of people write “house” in the following way: “ouse”, this 1% of people will find your site easily.
Distribution of articles and pages
Install clickable buttons on your site that allow you to send summaries of these articles and pages to social media, which in turn can generate traffic, especially if the one who posted the article has a lot of followers.
In conclusion, there is no ideal website SEO strategy. Be aware, however, that you should not give up too quickly: Google likes sites that are older!