The power of SEO for your business

By: Batool Abu Zaghleh

Every business owner aims to rank among the top results on search engines such as Google. Achieving this visibility can enhance awareness of your business and provide ample opportunities to showcase your services, products, and projects effectively. How can search engine optimization assist you in achieving this goal?

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website's content, structure, and overall online presence to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It involves techniques such as keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and technical SEO (more on those later) to make the website appealing to both search engines and users.

 

The importance of SEO for your business?

For businesses, SEO is essential since it makes content visible in search results organically. This gives you the ability to obtain ranks without having to pay for them through pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

When a customer uses a search engine to find information or a specific business, they usually click on the first page of results. Employing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies helps businesses show up in the most visible results, which dramatically increases their online visibility and traffic. Being featured in the search results pages makes the market more competitive and increases the company's revenue stream. 

How to create SEO-optimized content?

Writing with keeping search engine optimization in mind increases the chance of being found on Google. And this can be achieved by taking the following tips in consideration:

 

1. Find Your Primary Keyword

Before you start writing, you need to identify your primary keyword. The primary keyword is the main term (or phrase) you want to optimize your content around. To improve the chance that your content shows up when someone searches for that term or phrase in Google.

2. Choose Your Secondary Keywords

Once you have a primary keyword to target, you’ll also need to find secondary keywords. Secondary keywords are keywords closely related to your primary keyword. These may include synonyms, related subtopics, or long-tail variations (meaning highly specific terms) of your primary keyword.

3. Satisfy Search Intent

After you’ve identified your keywords, you need to make sure the content you create satisfies search intent. Search intent is the reason why users search for your keywords. For blog posts, your primary and secondary keywords will likely have informational intent. This means users want to learn something about a topic. And the best way to teach them about a topic is to use the right content format.

4. Create Quality Content

Without focusing on quality, no amount of optimization will help you rank higher. Quality content means that it is accurate, provides value to your audience, is original and unique, and is engaging and interactive.

 

5. Leverage Keywords in Your Content

Incorporate your researched keywords into your content organically. Google looks at the words in your content to understand what it’s about. So, it can rank it appropriately. To achieve that, avoid keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of using keywords in an unnatural way. It’s a tactic some use to try to manipulate search engines into ranking their content higher.

6. Structure Content with Subheadings

Subheadings (H2-H6) are miniature titles that divide your content into sections.

They’re important for SEO because they help you:

• Organize your content and make it easier to read and understand
• Use keywords and related terms in a natural way
• Allow users to easily scan content for the information they need. Which is great for the user experience.

7. Make Your Content Easy to Read

One of the key aspects of good SEO writing is readability. Readability is a measure of how easily your audience can read and understand your content. If your content is difficult to read, readers will not continue reading your page, and they will likely never come back. Behaviors like these signals to Google that your content is of low quality. So, it may not rank very well.

8. Add Internal Links

Internal links are links that point to other pages on your own website. They direct readers to other valuable, relevant content. Internal links are also important for SEO because they give opportunity to other links in your website to rank, too.

 

9. Optimize Your Content for Featured Snippets

Google could be showing featured snippets for your primary and secondary keywords. Which are huge opportunities to increase your visibility.

Featured snippets are concise responses provided by Google, often presented as paragraphs, lists, or tables. These responses are typically extracted from the highest-ranking pages. You can do this by stealing the idea or the format of this snippet from a competitor and optimize your content to look like it.

10. Write a Compelling Meta Description

A meta description is a short summary of your article that can appear below the title tag. Google may not always display the meta description you set for your article. Sometimes, they override it and generate the description that they think will work best for users. And it’s worth mentioning that meta descriptions aren’t a direct ranking factor. Despite all this, it’s still worth optimizing them. Because a well-written meta description has the potential to persuade users to click on your article.

There are always many changes that can occur on the use of internet due to the speed developments that we can see every day, but most importantly, is to keep up with these changes to write the best SEO content possible.