The decline in sales in physical shops is leading companies to invest in the area of business that seems to have suffered the least from the consequences and which, in many cases, has even become a lifeline: e-commerce.
This new sales channel, experts say, will grow even more in the coming years, which will shape the business model of thousands of entrepreneurs. However, once immersed in the world of digitalisation, the race continues.
why is SEO important?
The Internet is a huge ocean in which there is a lot of competition and the chances of your company being found are very low. If you are not well positioned, you will not appear in the first search results and this will worsen your sales.
Most internet users use search engines, mainly Google, which has 92% of the market share, according to data from the e-commerce services company Trusted Shops. Moreover, users no longer carry out direct searches via URLs and normally access the web pages of the first results that appear in the search engine, which makes positioning an essential instrument for entrepreneurs.
To avoid drowning in the attempt, the first thing to do is to know the language of SEO and the tools to improve it.
What is SEO
To achieve a better positioning in search engines and improve the visibility of your website in the organic results of the different search engines, it is of vital importance to take SEO into account.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important to make your website more visible through search engine optimisation and thus have a higher authority in search engines. Carrying out a successful SEO strategy will help you to get more people to find your company's website and thus attract more potential customers.
what is the purpose of SEO? The idea is for your website to appear at the top of the first search page of search engines, as we know that these are the ones that are most likely to be consulted.
How search monitors work
The way a search engine works can be summarised in two steps: crawling and indexing.
- Crawling
A search engine crawls the web with what are called bots. These bots crawl through all the pages via links. Hence the importance of a good link structure. Just as any user would do when browsing web content, they move from link to link and collect data about those web pages.
The crawling process starts with a list of web addresses from previous crawls and site-maps provided by other websites. Once they access these websites, the bots look for links to other websites to visit. The bots are particularly attracted to new sites and new developments on existing websites.
It is the bots themselves that decide which pages to visit, how often and how long they will crawl that site, so it is important to have an optimal loading time and up-to-date content.
- Indexing
Once a bot has crawled a website and gathered the necessary information, these pages are included in an index, where they are sorted according to their content, authority and relevance, so that when we make a query, the search engine will find it much easier to show us the results that are most relevant to our query.
Nowadays search engines are more sophisticated and base their indexes on hundreds of different aspects. The date of publication, whether they contain images, videos or animations, microformats, etc. are some of these aspects. They now give more priority to the quality of the content so you should take this into account.
Once the pages are crawled and indexed, it's time for the algorithm to act: algorithms are the computer processes that decide which pages appear before or after in the search results. Once the search is done, the algorithms check the indexes to see which pages are the most relevant, taking into account the hundreds of ranking factors.
And all this happens in a matter of milliseconds.
The 10 steps you need to follow
- Create a buyer persona according to your business
It is essential to understand who you are going to sell your products or services to. Develop your buyer persona, i.e. the fictitious and generalised representation of your ideal customer. This profile helps you to relate to your customers as real human beings.
Ready, but how do you create a buyer persona? You can use research through surveys and interviews of your target audience.
- Identify keywords
Once you have identified your buyer persona, the next step in your strategy is to analyse what kind of searches they do and what are the best words to position your website.
You can use the Google Trends tool, which allows you to see what people are searching for on Google. If you have a Google Adwords account, you can also use the free Keyword Planner tool, which helps you find the words or phrases that users search for the most according to language and country.
A good rule to follow to speed up your work is to organise your keywords by categories or services and in order of importance.
- Analyse your competition
After identifying which keywords you want to be related to your website, it is important to observe which companies can substitute your product and establish themselves as direct competitors .
A good tool to use is Screaming Frog, which can help you find out which keywords your competitors are using to optimise your SEO strategy.
- Take care of your images
Your entire website should be SEO friendly, including your images. When naming your photos, make sure you name the file correctly. The idea is that Google can tell what the image is about by the keyword you add to the photo, as it is the main subject of the image. Make sure you add alt text that includes the SEO keyword for that page and is relevant to the image.
Another factor to consider is load time, as this is important for SEO - the faster the site, the easier it is to visit and index a page.
- Keep the details in mind
To be successful in your SEO strategy, details are important because they gradually add up points with Google. The truth is that a website must have certain specific configurations to carry out the positioning in search engines. Some details to keep in mind:
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- The meta-description: this is the text that appears in the search results (SERP). When writing the meta-description of your pages, try to include your keywords and a call to action. Remember that it should not exceed 155 characters.
- Customise your links: be sure to customise your URLs according to the content of each page of your website and include your keywords. Be careful to remove accents and full stops or commas within your URL as this will affect SEO .
- Create your favicon: the "favourite icon" is the small image that appears in the address bar, favourites and bookmarks of your browser .
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- Fix broken links
Many of us have probably experienced a "404 error", which is a broken link that can damage your SEO efforts .
When your visitors discover that they have broken links, they will not want to continue browsing other pages, and if your visitors spend less time on your site, search engines will assume that you are not providing a good user experience and will lower your ranking
- Use your own links
When you write content for your website, try to make one topic lead to another to prolong the time your readers spend on your site. How to do it? Use your blog's internal links and link them to related keywords or key phrases, so if users want to know more in depth they will click and continue consuming your content. You have to be clever in your writing and think about how you are going to link it so that it is coherent with the rest of the article.
- Strengthen your content
Your content should be useful, original and creative. Before selling your product or service, think about how you can help your buyer persona, then write a friendly article, well-crafted with examples and tips, and with a tone that matches your brand .
Ideally, it should be more than 1,000 words long, as several studies have shown that more elaborate articles tend to have better SEO results.
- Analyse and measure your SEO strategy
A free tool that helps you to analyse, optimise and check the status of your website in search engines is Google Search Console. This website analyses and shows you all the errors that Google finds when it reads your website in order to optimise it.
- He who perseveres, achieves
An SEO strategy requires a lot of patience and dedication. Invest the necessary time to create and customise a good website. In order not to lose the rhythm it is essential that you organise yourself, so develop a plan of monthly objectives with the different SEO tactics that you are going to implement in order to have a better control of your actions and to be able to evaluate them.
It is very important that you understand the process of how to search for keywords to write content and have a good SEO positioning with your website.
Follow these 10 steps to select these words before writing your content, it is important that you have everything well organised. Quality is better than quantity. I understand that it is a long but effective process.
