If your business is gearing up for a digital launch, or has a digital presence already, then one of the most important steps you must take is to set strong SEO foundations. Unfortunately, many businesses overlook this crucial stage and end up missing out on valuable opportunities and, in many cases, commercial returns.
In this post, we'll discuss why setting SEO foundations is essential from a marketing, commercial, and sales perspective and how doing so can help propel your business towards success both short and long term.
SEO foundations: What are they?
SEO foundations are the building blocks of successful Search Engine Optimisation. By optimising your website’s layout, content, and backend technical elements, it can help improve your rankings. Foundation setting should include a combination of techniques including carefully selected keywords, relevant backlinks, metadata and optimised images to increase the visibility of your webpages.
Developing an understanding of these fundamental elements is important for any aspiring SEO expert or teams tasked with digital performance. With a good foundation in SEO fundamentals, you could be well on your way to achieving higher site rankings and increased traffic.
Benefits of setting SEO foundations
Setting strong SEO foundations is crucial for any business looking to improve their online presence and achieve long-term success. As your website is the online window to your business making sure you are ranking for the right searches and amongst your competitors is vital to being seen by the right people at the right time in their buyer journey.
By optimising your website for search engines, you can build a solid online presence, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, enhance the user experience of your visitors, increase brand credibility, and drive commercial returns. Not only can SEO be your most cost-effective channel, when compared to other marketing tactics, it also provides sustainable results that will benefit your business in the long run.
The risks of not setting SEO foundations
Neglecting to set proper SEO foundations can have serious consequences for your business. Without optimising your website for search engines, you risk providing a poor user experience for your visitors, both from a content perspective and a technical standpoint, which can lead to high bounce rates and lost revenue.
Additionally, a lack of SEO can negatively impact your brand reputation and decrease your online visibility, making it harder for potential customers to find you. This can result in reduced ROI on marketing investments and higher long-term costs as you struggle to acquire new customers through other means.
How to set the foundations
A common place to start is keyword research. This involves analytical and keyword tools to find relevant phrases and topics that accurately describe your business, while also predicting what potential search terms users are typing in when looking for a business like yours. Once keyword research has been conducted, it's time to implement optimisations on page elements such as meta tags, headings, and images - simply put, these factors help your website perform well across different platforms.
Finally, having a good awareness of technical SEO is paramount for every SEO project. Technical SEO helps with indexing and crawling of your website by search engine bots and simplifies the process of finding and ranking specific types of content from your site. With keyword research, optimising on-page elements and technical SEO all in place, you should start seeing an increase in organic visibility.
How to measure the foundation and their impact
Measuring the impact of your SEO foundation is essential to understanding how your efforts are impacting your online presence. Analytical tools such as Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into user behaviour, engagement metrics, and conversion tracking. Keyword tracking and search engine ranking reports can help you understand how well your website is performing in search results and identify areas for improvement.
User behaviour analysis, such as click-through rates and bounce rates, can help you determine the effectiveness of your website's design and content. Finally, trend analysis can help you identify patterns over time and adjust your strategy accordingly. By regularly measuring the impact of your SEO foundation through these various methods, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts for maximum impact.
Setting good foundations are a key to building most things of value. Getting your sites SEO foundations “dug deep” will allow you to achieve numerous things as well as avoiding commercial and brand damaging issues. The advantages are many and, while daunting to start, getting every element in line will deliver positive returns time and time again for months and years to come.
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