Search engine marketing is a major part of a successful online marketing strategy. It is essential if you want to draw in traffic to your website. However, search engines can be intimidating, and smaller companies are weary of the budget and the expertise requirements needed to compete with their larger, more entrenched rivals. In this article, we have 3 search engine marketing tips that can help you achieve decent rankings and improve the traffic to your site with a minimal investment.

1. Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

Your website will need to meet certain technical criteria to rank highly on Google. To start, it will need to have an appropriate loading speed. The benchmark is 2 seconds or less, but if you can get it under half of a second, you are in a very good position. You then have to properly structure the site with usability in mind. A user should be able to move seamlessly from one page to the next and find all of the information he is looking for easily. Make sure that all of the links on your websites work properly, and that they do not lead to error pages.

You will also want to make the website mobile friendly. Not only is Google taking this into account as a ranking factor, but almost half of all traffic comes from a mobile device. For this, you can use a responsive design that delivers the same information to users across all devices. Finally, you have keyword optimization. Webpages that are optimized for certain keywords will help web crawlers determine if the content is relevant to a query. Keyword optimization is done by including the right keywords in the content itself, the meta titles, meta descriptions, headings and URLs.

There are several tools you can use here:

  • SEMrush – this tool can help you identify the various technical issues that keep your website from higher rankings.
  • UberSuggest – this is a keyword research tool.
  • org – this tool will help you structure your data properly so that your website becomes crawler friendly.
  • Yaost SEO – this is a keyword optimization tool for the content on your website.
  • Google PageSpeed Insights – a tool that will help you increase your loading speed.
  • Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool – test and optimize your website for mobile devices.
  • Google Search Console – test and analyze the performance of your website.

2. Become Relevant Locally

If you have a brick and mortar store, or if your market is located in a certain region of the country, you can use localized SEO techniques to target customers within that area. These techniques include:

  • Creating a Google My Business profile.
  • Optimizing the site for localized search terms, and creating content that addresses local issues and search queries.
  • Adding contact details such as address and phone number to your sites footer, contact page and about page.

3. Create Valuable Content

Every day, thousands of users have queries that are related to your business niche. It is up to you to create the content that addresses these queries and helps customers with the information they need. This can be done through blog posts, videos and infographics.

Once a user finds your content useful or engaging, he is more likely to spend time on your website, and share the content on social media. This not only helps your brand, it also sends a signal to Google that you are an authority in your niche, and that your content should be seen by more people.

Here are some tools that can help you out if you are creating content for SEM in Naperville:

  • Grammarly – a tool that checks your content for grammatical errors.
  • Canva – a free-to-use image manipulation tool similar to Photoshop.
  • Buzzsumo – use this tool to check for trending content related to your niche.
  • Google Analytics – track various performance metrics for your content, such as bounce rate, time spent on the site, etc.

Contact a Naperville SEM Agency

If you would like to learn more about how to effectively manage your SEM efforts to deliver the best results, contact us today for a free analysis.