Hows should you pick you SEO strategy?

Everyone has heard about search engine optimization (SEO) and knows that it helps in branding and reputation management and traffic generation. This article covers the various application of SEO and guides you to choose the appropriate SEO objective for your business.

Here are the various value producing objectives for SEO:

SEO for Traffic generation

The website is optimised basically for the search engines for targeted keywords to drive traffic from search engines, which usually expands into content sharing, generating direct traffic and referring links as more and more people find and benefit from the work that you have done online. There are thousands of websites that use this traffic sent from the search engines to directly monetize and advertise.

When to Employ

When you need to drive traffic to your website to improve its reach.

Keyword Targeting

The idea here is not to target only specific keywords, but look at creating lots of high quality content that naturally targets interesting/searched-for terms. Instead of singular specific keywords the focus should be on accessibility and best practices through the entire site to earn traffic through both high volume and long tail keywords

Web Page  Content Creation & Optimization

A not a very deep and easily crawl-able link structure is important to getting all the pages indexed by the search engine. Follow an organised information structure like Heading and sub heading to get the best out of your content. Also ensure a good on-page optimisation like Title tag, H1 tag and internal linking etc. Make your content more engaging and easy to share on various platforms to benefit for viral spreading.

Search Engine Optimisation for ecommerce business

SEO has the potential to drive quality traffic to the website which can be easily monetized. As it has been observed that search traffic is the best quality available on the internet as the person is already intended to search for a particular query with a specific objective and when this matches your product or brand carried by the web store conversion rates ought to be higher. This is the reason that all the eCommerce players need to be present on the website with a well optimised website.

When to Employ

Use this if you have product or service that can be sold directly on the website

Keyword Targeting

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a brilliant way to check the effectiveness and potential return on investment for the targeted keywords. Look out for those that have good traffic and converts well.  It is observed that more specific the query which includes the brand name and product details etc, the probability of the customers buying it increases.

Web Page  Content Creation & Optimization

You will definitely need some good link building strategy and execution along with internal optimisation to get a high ranking for high value and competitive keywords which gets in quality and targeted traffic.  Manual link building is a very good option, but scalable strategies that influence a community or customers can be more rewarding

SEO for Branding

A not very popular but an equally rewarding purpose of SEO is to use it for branding. Bloggers, social media websites, content producers, news outlets and a whole lot of other web publishing models have found remarkable value in appearing at top of the search engine results and using the resulting exposure to boost their brand identification and authority.

When to Employ

When your business needs more attention for the target audience or the market to drive traffic and eventually sales. It is common for companies who need to acquire customers or participation from them.

Keyword Targeting

Here the focus is not on the specific keywords; instead you can try and embed your brand with a longer query so that you receive the desired target audience, and having a long tail keyword is easier to achieve and is worth the effort. Choose keywords that are going to bring you traffic you are probably interested in, and remember your website and brand.

Web Page Content Creation & Optimization

The similar principles as raw traffic applies here  – make an easily accessible site, use good link structure and best practices and focus on links for domain authority more so than specific keywords.

SEO for Lead Acquisition & Direct Marketing

While this is not as direct as the ecommerce website, but lead acquisition through the website is a critical part in building the customer base and increasing the revenue. There are numerous search queries with a commercial intent that cannot be satisfied completely online like legal, healthcare, real-estate, various loans and many more which need human intervention but they can source customers through website.

When to Employ

When you are into business which need to be served physically and want to generate enquiries and leads through your website

Keyword Targeting

Similar to the eCommerce choose well searched queries and those that have performed well in the past in the PPC campaigns

Web Page Content Creation & Optimization

While you might think they will be easier than e-commerce, lead generation are often equally tough. You will need a concrete strategy and a combination of on-site and off-page optimization to be competitive.

SEO for Reputation Management

Those who have a bad reputation or are not present on the web. SEO can be a good tool to populate the search results with positive content and links. SEO is useful in this process of building the link and making it popular in the right sense. It is one of the upcoming areas for the businesses.

When to Employ

If you are trying to either safeguard your brand from having negative results appear on top pages, or making efforts to pull down already existing negative content, reputation management SEO is the only path to success.

Keyword Targeting

There are chances that this might be a bit easy as your brand name is associated with the negative aspect. Do a thorough keyword research and look out for any variants that you are missing

Web Page Content Creation & Optimization

Unlike every other SEO method, reputation management requires optimizing pages on many different domains in order to push results behind in the SERPs. This requires using different social media profiles, public relations sites, press releases sites, links from networks of sites you might own or manage along with usual optimization of internal links & on-page optimisation. It is definitely among the most difficult of SEO practices, especially in Google, where QDD (Query Deserves Diversity) can mean you have to work many times as hard to push down negatives because of how the algorithm employs content preferences.

Choosing the Right SEO Objectives for Your Business

Before you start with the long term SEO strategy for your business, you should carefully consider which of these have a major impact on you business objective. As you need to concentrate on one strategy at a time. As a business you need to decide on what you want to accomplish and ask yourself questions like:

• Does the company need direct sales, traffic, branding or some combination of these?
• Are there influencers you are trying to reach with a message?
• Is the organization subject to potentially negative content that needs to be managed?
• Do you have products or services that you sell directly over the website or through leads generation model?

Once you have the answers to the above queries you can approach SEO with the right list of objectives to achieve. Of course, the crucial part then becomes executing on that strategy