Make it Easier for Prospective Customers to Find your Business Through Google Search: SEO Marketing.

Brand visibility is a huge part of successful marketing. Even if someone happened to be the worst supplier in town, if that person was positioned in a place where people see them more than their competitors, that person’s sales would be automatically higher than those of their opponents. Visibility is what drives brand awareness. People will only buy things they know to exist. 

This marketing principle is eternal. Businesses that have the most visibility have the most customers. Go to Soweto, go to town center, go to City Market, it is still the same. In the field of Digital Marketing, SEO is the strategy that savvy Digital Marketers use to become more visible in search engine results (SERP’s).

This means that when someone googles a topic related to your niche, your online content should be among the top results. If you are a barbershop in Lusaka, your goal should be to always rank among the top 10 results every time someone googles barbershops in Lusaka.

Just imagine, a tourist is in Zambia and they want to go to the best hotel in town. In this digital age, the one thing you may expect them to do is to Google “best hotel in Lusaka.” Search engines like Google have what they call spiders. These spiders scout the web to find the most significant list of results for every query that’s made in their search fields. If you want to be found in this list of top results, what you need to do is to optimize your high-rank probabilities.

The question is how do you do that? Optimizing digital content has two sides to it. On one side, it involves HTML technical know-how. On the other end, it involves literary creativity. If that sounds too deep for your liking, you only have to abide by the following simple rules:

1.      Ensure that your content is mobile responsive

Who doesn’t know this? Most people that surf or browse the internet use mobile devices (Tablets and mobile phones). This means that the more your content is accessible to people using these devices, the wider your audience becomes. But wait a minute, it doesn’t end there. Google has also developed an algorithm that favors content which is mobile friendly. Have you ever tried to open a link only to find out that it couldn’t be loaded by your phone or tablet? You hate it right? Turns out Google also hates that. Consequently, if you’re a marketer ensure that your pages don’t fall into that category of pages which Google penalizes for not being mobile friendly. Html has various specifications for various things- talk about image size, theme type, dynamism and so much more (web developers know better). Whatever you do, consider these things in terms of how they affect mobile device accessibility to your pages and content.

2.      Ensure that all your Articles have Captivating Titles

I mentioned this in the previous article; in so far as driving traffic to your website, blog or social media pages is concerned, the title is like a magic stick. When crafting the title, ensure that it has the keywords that your prospective clients are likely to punch into a search engine field. If what you want to communicate in your article is the fact that you are the best barbershop in Lusaka, Google expects you to include the phrase “best barbershop” in the title of that article. Furthermore, Google is smart enough to analyze your main content for words synonymous or related with what is in your title. This means that if my main title has the phrase “best barbershop” in it, the spiders will crawl down into the content to check if the keywords are repeated, or if their synonyms are included. So here we are talking about repeating words like barber shop, salon, best and so forth. Related words also earn you marks. In our example, related words may include words like hair, Brush cut, shaver… I believe you’ve figure that one out.

3.      Use Images in your Content

Don’t ask me why but search engines prioritize content that has images in it. The more images you include in your web pages and blog posts, the higher the rankings you’d receive in search engine results (SERP’s). Come to think of it, I actually do know why this is the case. It is because we humans are just so in love- real love- with images. Sometimes we don’t even care if the content is garbage, as long as the image is captivating, we would follow the link. Because of that, Google and its colleagues said let’s give the people what they want.

4.      Include Outbound Links in your Content

Outbound links are links that send your audience from the current page to another page. These external links direct your audience to where they can find more information about the topic at hand. You have surely come across an article that included clickable blue text, which if followed would lead you to another page. That was an outbound link.

Remember the college days? Lecturers always emphasized for you to cite your work. The main reason for that was because they didn’t want us to plagiarize. But there were other reasons too. One of those other reasons was the fact that citations give authority to your work. Citing other people in your work is like saying, ‘look! I didn’t bring that content out of thin air, even this guy believes in what I am saying.’ Psychologists refer to this principle as consensus, politicians call it democracy. The point is this; the more people there is who believe in something, the more that something is likely to be true. Outbound links are like web-based citations and references.

5.      Share your Articles on Various Social Media Communities

This point is the cousin of the previous point. By sharing your web pages and blog posts on social media, you increase the traffic thereto. This principle works on the assumption that the higher the traffic to a web page or blog, the more authority that blog or page has. Simple! Right? When a lot of people flock into one shop (by-passing the other shops around that area), your natural conclusion would be that the shop has good services, right? Anyway, that’s what my conclusion would be. Remember the algorithms I said Google has built for ranking pages, one of those algorithms operates on a similar basis. On this point, the Christians would love to quote Mathew 25:29 (those who have much will receive more. But those with little, the little they have will be taken away). So, share your articles on FB, YouTube, Linkedin and so forth. Pay for ads if possible. Then your content will be search engine optimized.

6.      Ensure that your website or blog always has Fresh content

Recency is a very big factor in Google rankings. If we hold all other factors constant, the newer a blog post is, the more Google will include it in top results. This is very understandable, new publications have a higher chance of including recent news, recent facts, corrections and so forth. If you had to get a text with five editions, which version do you think would serve your current information needs better? I would opt for the 5th edition. Don’t know about you and whatever reason you may have for preferring the older versions. Similarly, Google assumes that recently posted content is more up-to-date.

But what about your old posts? Do you just let them die a natural death, the way you’d watch a literal book grow old and lose shape? Far from that; the digital era has brought as much means. Every blogger knows that blog posts and web pages are editable. So make it a habit to go through your old posts; see if there is new information you may want to include in those posts. For example, if you had made a post before you realized the importance of including an image, what stops you from doing that right now? 

Keep in mind: Sound and Video content is gaining momentum. Pretty soon much of the high ranked posts will be those that have sound or video content in them. Also, if you don’t care to spend money, there is a way to appear in top search by paying google. This advertisement program is called Google Adwords.

Conclusion

This list of techniques is by no means exhaustive. I just thought that by writing this article I may help the people who care about this topic to dig deeper. There are many more techniques that you can use to improve your ranking in search results. Some of them are technical, others are psychological. Some are broad, others are detailed. Whatever the case, by the very fact that the modern business world is based on competition, marketing will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. So keep researching and sharpening your skills. In the next post I will talk about Digital media careers- job titles, hierarchy and all that.

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