With online purchases growing in popularity, brands need to do all they can to promote and sell their products and services. This includes using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices to get their website visible and rank higher on search engines results pages.
As the industry grows and evolves, digital marketing continues to provide more value than ever before. In turn, this means that SEO Specialist jobs are becoming more important to the job market.
Keyword Research
Keywords are the words that search engine users enter into a search bar to describe products and services they want to find in SEO Belfast. They also tell search engines what kind of information is on your website so they can rank and suggest your site to users.
Knowing what keywords to target is key for any SEO strategy. A good keyword research process includes identifying the most relevant terms, using a variety of tools to find competitive information and search volume data, and developing a list that aligns with your business objectives.
For example, a recruiter may use “job description” as a primary term to attract candidates to open positions. A different recruiter may target more specific terms like “jobs for millennials,” “maternity leave” or “best baby clothes.” Understanding the intent of potential searchers can help you develop your keyword list. For example, a search for “wedding cakes” may lead to an intent to buy, while “wedding cake ideas” may indicate more of a research intent.
On-Page Optimization
Millions of users use search engines every day to find answers to their queries, whether they’re looking for specific products or services, brands, or information about those businesses. If you want your business to appear among those results and gain visibility, traffic, and ultimately customers, SEO is crucial.
On-page optimization refers to the application of keyword research to webpage content in order to optimize it for search engine rankings and a higher chance of appearing in search engine result pages (SERPs). This typically includes changes to page titles, meta tags, headings, website structure, image SEO, internal links, and other techniques that send signals to search engines that your page is valuable and worth ranking highly.
A good example is ensuring that targeted keywords are included in the title tag of each page on your site. This is important because it helps to ensure that the keywords match up with the user’s query when they search, and it also gives weight to those keywords in SERPs.
Off-Page Optimization
The on-page element of SEO involves tactics that can be controlled by a business’s website. This includes title tags, meta descriptions, URL structure, content and keyword placement and other aspects of the site that can be optimized to help search engines better understand what the page is about.
Off-page optimization, on the other hand, is about getting exposure for your brand and your pages around the web to attract more organic traffic and to improve search engine rankings. It can include everything from social media marketing to guest blogging to link building.
Businesses that have their on-page SEO ducks in a row should also work hard to get more visibility and off-page SEO exposure through events like trade shows, conferences, product launches and more. Customers can leave reviews of these experiences on Google, which helps build the business’s reputation and trustworthiness. They can also share these events on their own social media networks, which is a great way to get additional free publicity.
Link Building
Back in the day before Google became dominant, search engines ranked pages based on the content alone. Today, a page’s ranking is influenced by the quality and quantity of inbound links.
Link building is the process of acquiring one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to your website in order to increase search engine visibility. The more high-quality backlinks a webpage has, the higher it will rank on SERPs.]
There are many different ways to go about obtaining backlinks, but some of the most common include using tools like Check My Links or Checker Plus to find broken links on a page, reaching out to the webmaster of the site to offer them a link from their own page, and doing outreach to create relationships with other marketers within your niche. While these strategies can be time-consuming, they tend to yield the best results. And that’s why they are at the core of any effective SEO strategy.