How to Build an SEO Strategy for Your Business From Scratch

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fundamental part of your digital marketing strategy. SEO is a set of criteria that you have to follow so that your website shows up on the first page of search results.

The higher your website ranks the more traffic you get. This increases the chances of gaining more customers.

At first glance, search engine optimization may seem complicated — especially for beginners.

However, at its core, SEO isn’t complicated at all.

Even with little experience, you can implement SEO strategies to help improve your website search engine ranking.

If you’re wondering how you can go about applying SEO, you’ve come to the right place.

Today, we will lay down the groundwork for crafting an effective SEO strategy.

Step 1: Audit Your Website for Searchability

Before you get started with creating an SEO strategy, you need to make sure search engines can read, or crawl, your website.

If your website has everything in HTML text format, then search engines won’t have a problem reading and indexing your website.

However, for images, flash files, Javascripts, and other non-text items, search engines may have a hard time reading your site.

To know where your website stands in terms of searchability, use tools like Google cache or the MozBar. These will help you see what parts of your website are visible to search engines.

Here are two ways to work around non-HTML text elements:

• Add alt-attributes to images. This allows search engines to read visual content and helps rank the page.
• Provide a transcript for audio or visual files. Doing this is another way to help search engines crawl and index your website.

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is key to your SEO strategy. The more you know about your target audience, the better you can understand what they’re searching for and how they use search engines.

To better understand your target audience, consider the following:

• Where do they live?
• How do they receive information?
• What communication mediums do they frequent? Social media? Email?
• What is their income?
• What are their interests?
• What are their values?

Based on these, you can better know how your website’s content can serve your audience.

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