All businesses want to reach their customers and be the go-to company in their industry.

You need to make sure that people find your product or service when they search online, instead of landing on a competitor’s page.

To achieve this, you must be strategic about your search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertisements. Here are some things to look out for when building your online marketing strategy, or when hiring SEO consultant services.

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(1) Target readers, not search engines

Write buyer personas and build quality content that responds to their concerns—if you do, you will naturally surface as a go-to brand. Tap into the common problems your personas face, and identify the keywords they search frequently.

When you prioritize search engines, you will come out with posts that do not mean much to the people you want to reach. Make your content relatable and informative for your personas, and algorithms will deem your website relevant.

(2) Produce content on a regular basis

Increase your organic site traffic by blogging regularly. When you post frequently on your website, you will quickly amass a collection of posts focused on your niche—if you focus on content that is always relevant, you are sure to get traffic consistently, over a period of months or even years.

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Be active in your network, as well. Read, comment, and react to other people and companies’ blogs, especially the ones in your niche.

Though this does not guarantee replies, you will usually come across as incredibly helpful and social, always a good thing in business.

Look into posting on places like Quora as well. People go on social platforms to ask questions about various things, and you can build your authority by responding thoughtfully to queries about your niche on this site.

(3) Be thoughtful about keywords and meta data

When you rank highly on Google, it means Google sees your website as an influential source for a niche. If you want to rank, you must include long-tail keywords and optimize even your meta title, URL, and description.

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Look out for your on-page SEO factors, since these make your website more understandable to algorithms. A digital marketing agency can use tools like Ahrefs, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, and the SEO tools provided by HubSpot, among others.

(4) Use internal and incoming links

Links within your blog help people navigate smoothly between posts and pages of your website. You can even chart journeys through your content—an especially helpful way of introducing newcomers to your website.

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You can also encourage friends, clients, industry personalities, fellow bloggers, and other interested people to link to your online space. This is a valuable marketing technique used in small business SEO services.

If you have plenty of meaningful external links, you will rank highly on search engines. Be careful not to overdo these, however—having too many internal links or having low-quality external ones would register as unhelpful.

(5) Be your first and biggest fan

Share your company’s posts on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more—an active social media presence helps you get your company’s name out online. Make sure your posts have share buttons as well—this will help others spread your posts wide. Of course, this assumes that you have done your homework, and made a post worth sharing!

(6) Optimize your content

Do you want to improve your website and get a higher conversion rate? Then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be high on your to-do-list. Good quality content with the right keywords is a very important aspect of your website. SEO is not about putting an overload of keywords into one text. This only makes the text weird and unreadable.

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There is a lot to know about good SEO and not everyone can do it. SEO is not an art, but a science. It is about putting the right keywords in the right places, inserting links into the text and using the right amount of words, so that search engines like Google will consider it to be a good text. And of course you don’t only want Google to like the content on your website. It should also be attractive to your visitors. Long story short, in case you are not an SEO expert, it is a good idea to hire an SEO specialist to optimize the content on your website.

(7)Profit from media hypes

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just make use of things that are happening in the world and get a lot of media attention. For example, the social media team of Oreo did a good job during the Superbowl power outage in 2013. The power was out for 34 minutes, and during that time Oreo threw out an ad that capitalized on the outage.

(8) Run an A/B Test

What design makes people want to stay on your website and buy your products? What images, texts and colors make the conversion rate go up? The only way to get an answer to these questions, is by running an A/B test. This makes it possible to compare the results of one design with a design that is slightly different. The results are very unpredictable. Stuff that you think will work, might not have the effect you were hoping for. So never change anything on your website without running an A/B test first.

SEO agency Ireland will do this

The factor that makes your conversion rates go up, can be as simple as an image or a color. There is a lot you can change on your website, but when you want to run an A/B test, it is important to change just one aspect at a time. If you make multiple changes and you run the test, you will never know what aspect caused a certain outcome.

A great example of an A/B test is this one from DHL. The only aspect that was changed, was the image of the box. What image do you think causes people to buy more?

(9) An SEO expert in Ireland will realize that geography is key 

If you are a small business, geography can play a very important role in getting yourself found on Google. Even if you are not restricted in the area you cover, it will often still pay to optimise your website for specific locations.

Why it’s important

Over the last few years we’ve seen Google search results become increasingly dominated by big brands. The sort of brands with the track record – and big budgets – to produce large quantities of quality content and get it linked to across the internet. Small businesses simply can’t compete on a national scale.

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Unless you operate in a VERY small niche, getting onto page 1 of Google for high volume keywords is going to take a lot of time and effort with no guarantee of results.

But adding geographic locations can drastically reduce the competition and make it much more likely you’ll make it onto that coveted first page.

The best SEO company in Ireland will choose the correct words

It is vital, however, to choose the right geographic term(s) to target.

In many cases you will need to compromise between search volume and ranking. There is little point in being on page 7 of Google for a highly popular search term. You will likely get more website visitors from being on page 1 for a less popular term.

What do people search for

Start by researching the terms people use when searching for your product or service.

Is it a town, village, suburb, county, region? It may be by postcode – quite common for services like domestic cleaning where people want someone who is very local to them.

Is it important that they find someone who is close by or is that not really important as long as they cover that area?

What’s the competition like?

Now do some searches adding those geographical terms to your main keywords & phrases. This will give you an idea of the levels of competition (remember that Google personalises search results so use the results for guidance only).

If, like me, you are based in a large city (Manchester, in my case) then optimising for that location may still get you nowhere near page 1 of Google. So think about whether to use a specific suburb or area. Using compass points for example, (e.g. South Manchester) lets you qualify the phrase but still include the key term.

Decide which location(s) to target

You should now have an idea of the geographical locations you want to target.

You may want to target more than one location – it’s very common for big brands to do this and create specific web pages for different cities and towns.

Or you may decide to focus on a single place and use it across your site.

The best SEO company in Ireland will weave words in like magic

Having chosen your targeted locations, you now need to optimise your website to include those terms.

There are several things you can do:

Add locations into your page meta titles. This is the most important. Instead of “John Smith Wedding photography” you want something like “Wedding Photographer Thirsk, Yorkshire”.

Include the locations you cover in the text of your pages.

Make sure you include your full address on every page.

Think about creating separate web pages for each individual location. I recently spoke to a business who had done this very successfully and seen their enquiry numbers rocket. However, you can’t simply duplicate the page and change the location – you need different content on each page.

Avoid cramming every page with your geographical terms – it just looks spammy. Visitors won’t like it and neither will Google. Ensure everything reads very naturally and always think about your potential customer first.

(10) The best SEO companies near me will use great blogging

I’m sure you’ve heard that having a blog helps your SEO, but do you know why and how?

I see many blogs which are never in a million years going to help with search rankings. If you want your small business blog to bring you more business, you need to approach it properly.

So how does a blog help with SEO?

The best SEO companies near me will target more keywords

Each blog article is an opportunity to target a different keyword or key phrase (usually the latter). Now each of those key phrases may only have a small search volume, but it will be highly relevant and those small volumes add up.

It’s better to be on page 1 for phrases with 10 searches a month than page 8 for a phrase which has 1000.

Targeting keywords doesn’t mean that you need to repeat them constantly in your article – that technique went out the window years ago. Make sure you have the key phrase in your article title and then write naturally for a human audience.

Gain links

To get good search engine rankings you will need links from other websites.

Blogs can help you get links, BUT people are only going to link to your blog articles if they are really good.

To get links your content needs to be useful, funny or controversial.  It’s not enough to write a bland piece on “Top tips for……”, you need to make it really stand out from all the dross that gets published on the web (often written by junior SEO people who know nothing about the business they are supposed to be promoting).

Showcase your skill and knowledge and create content that your target audience will really appreciate.

Fresh Content

Google likes sites which are updated frequently. By adding new pages consistently to your website you send signals to the search engines that this is a site which is up to date and they will visit your site more often.

Social Shares

It’s inevitable that social shares will become increasingly important for search rankings. These are things like Tweets, Facebook Likes, Google Plus Ones etc. As with links, people are not going to like or share your blog posts unless they are really good.

Important

Remember, that to get the SEO benefits for your main website, your blog really needs to be part of that website and not on a hosted blogging platform like Blogger or Tumblr.

If your blog is separate, then the SEO benefits go to the blog and your website only gets the small boost from the link from that blog, as shown in this diagram.

SEO Company near me? The Conclusion

If you want to increase your organic traffic, you have to give people what they are looking for online. Learn your audience’s preferences, by using tools that track your audience’s behaviour and log things like location, days or hours most active, and other important details.

Looking for the best SEO company in Ireland?

It can be overwhelming trying to launch and execute a marketing campaign, but it is wholly possible with enough preparation. To know what you should look for in SEO companies, keep reading SEO Service. We provide strategies and tips on organic growth, along with help in finding the best online marketing SEO services for you.