SEO
At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients in Markham and across the GTA to improve their websites and their SEO rankings. Now it is more important than ever to focus on your business’s SEO and how to activate it for success. Our last blog delved into the world of SEO and provided lots of tips that you could employ. This blog will cover some of the remaining points to keep in mind when you are developing your website and the all-important SEO.
Your SEO will Help Your Ecommerce Efforts
Even before the current COVID-19 pandemic global e-commerce was exploding. It is estimated that by 2021 online purchases will reach $4.5 trillion and will account for 17.5% of all retail sales. If you are a business, whether you sell online or not, you need to invest the time and effort into improving your SEO as it is estimated that 81% of people research purchases online before they make a final decision of what to purchase. Incredibly it’s also been reported that 75% of mobile searches end up with people visiting the store they researched within 24 hours and subsequently 30% of these visits result in an in-store purchase.
Growth in Mobile Traffic and Local SEO
At Insiteful Solutions, we have been working with clients for over 15 years addressing all aspects of their online digital marketing campaigns. One of the most important aspects of SEO is the growth of mobile traffic because so many people are using their phones to search things on Google or other search engines, the local search is an integral part to the success of a small or medium-sized business. Local SEO focuses digital results for a specific geographic area, this helps people close to your place of business find you faster. Your brand can work on messaging to target customers based on what town, city or province you happen to be located. At Insiteful Solutions, we will optimize your website content to link it to local citations and other relevant links to the location and sector your business operates in. We will also draw focus to your reviews on Yelp and Google and any other user review sites related to your industry.
Focus on Metadata
At Insiteful Solutions, we also work on your metadata. When you design your company’s website each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert information about the contents of your page – that’s the metadata. You can review and update your metadata, this is often overlooked by businesses who still with their original site for far too long. Along with your content, your metadata should be refreshed at regular intervals.
Metadata is also connected to the ever-important keyword phrases that you develop to match your brand. The title metadata, for example, is responsible for the titles you see displayed at the top of a browser window and provides the headline within search engine results. At Insiteful Solutions, we will also help you develop your description metadata and keyword metadata. Your description metadata is the text that a search engine may use in your page search – it should be a brief informative description of what your website contains. Keyword metadata can be a few phrases made up of one to four words that describe what your business sells.
Keyword Use for ‘Click Here’ Links
Many businesses make the mistake of wasting links embedded within the text of your website. Including banal ‘click here’ links is a wasted opportunity as they have no search engine value; it is more helpful to use keywords related to your business will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.
Alt Tags for Visuals and Videos
It is also important to use alt tags on your website when describing visual elements and embedded videos. For people that use text-only browsers or screen readers, this is very helpful and allows them to understand what is on your website. It also allows search engines to locate your page.
Indexing 101
Remember to check your indexing. Search engine indexing is the way in which a search engine collects, sorts and stores data for later use. This data is what informs the results for search engine queries. It is important to check your indexing to make sure Google (or other search engines) is capturing your data correctly. There are two ways you can check your indexing. The first way is to go to Google and type “site.yourdomain.com”, using this way will let you know quickly how many pages Google thinks your site has. The second way is to go to your search console and choose “index status”. Ideally, if you use both ways the numbers should match. By checking how your site is indexing you will be able to take advantage of Google analytics.
Investing in Your SEO
One of the main questions we receive from both old and new clients is how much should they invest in SEO and a quick second question is how long will it take to see results from their investment. At Insiteful Solutions we advise clients to think of SEO work as a long-term project whose investment will pay off in a few months; this wait time between and investment and results can often be off-putting to the people in charge of the SEO budget. But skimping on your SEO will be detrimental to your business in the long run. By working with SEO experts like Insiteful Solutions you will be able to work efficiently and economically to achieve your SEO goals.
At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients to create brand new websites or improve ones they may already have. Having been in business for over 15 years you can be confident that as the GTA’s leading SEO experts we can lead you through the process of improving your internet search rankings which will result in more clients and customers buying your service or product. Contact us today to get started on your improved SEO results.