What are some things required to run a business in 2020? I could go on and on about all the things you should be doing to become successful in 2020, but I am not going to do that. I am going to tell you about one specific thing you should be doing for almost all types of businesses. Search engine optimization, also known as SEO. In 2018 14.3% of total retail sales were made online representing $517.36 billion in one year alone. SEO is also a great way to bring people into the physical store, according to Nectafy, 88% of people who do a mobile search for a local business call or visit within 24 hours. The best way to get in on this growing trend is getting online traffic to your website through SEO.
What is SEO?
In simple terms, SEO is the process of increasing quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or web page to users of a web search engine. SEO also refers specifically to the improvement of unpaid results, known as natural or organic results, and excludes the purchase of paid placement. There is some art, and there is some science behind this process that drives the targeted website traffic you want to your website from search engines. The experts on SEO all have slightly differing opinions on what works best, but the general idea is the same across the board.
Organic VS Paid
Organic search results are results that rank 100% based on the merit of your website according to the search engines algorithms. There is no way to pay Google or any other search engines to rank your website higher in organic search results because the results are natural. The search engines do not mess with these organic results unless the sites showing up are violating some set of rules. There are hundreds of different ranking factors when it comes to organic search results, but Google deems which one’s are the most relative and trustworthy. Some of these factors being a secure and accessible website, page speed, mobile-friendliness, domain age, and lastly, optimized content. Paid search results are the ad’s for web pages you see above all other searches. This ad section is entirely separate from the organic section. How high you are ranked in the ad section of the search engine is based on how much you pay the search engine to be there. Advertising this way is also known as pay per click advertising. If you are a large company, pay per click advertising can be an excellent strategy to get people to come to your website. Advertising like this works because more often than not, most people do not take the time to look past the first few links on Google. The problem here is depending on the type of business you have one-click can cost as little as $1 per click or well over $50 per click which could become an issue for a small company.
Why SEO?
Why SEO? Well here is a stat for you 60% of all web traffic starts with a Google search. Let’s run through an example; let’s say you run a party supply company according to Google 110,000 people search party supplies every single month. The first result on Google alone gets 20% of all clicks that 22,000 clicks per month if you show up at the top. However, let’s quantify those search results; the average website will pay about $1 per click for that search phrase 1 time 22,000. That web traffic by being ranked first is approximately equal to $22,000 a month. That is just for one phrase with a well-optimized SEO website you can rank with hundreds sometimes thousands of keywords if done well. That was a low-end example in some industries such as auto insurance quotes people can pay as high as $50 per click.
Hot to be ranked in 2020?
Backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks. Backlinks are vital to be ranked in 2019 because Google, Bing, and other search engines give more credit to websites with more incoming links. The amount of inbound links is not the only factor when it comes to the credit search engines give websites; it is the quality of the incoming links that are key to getting your website ranked higher. Quality is defined as the popularity of the site, the relevance of the website, from a different source than your existing backlinks, and not paid.
The popularity of the website is merely directing people to the content you want them to view from your website. The relevance of the backlink with your page and what is on your page; this is important because the search engines algorithm will see that the sites are similar in content and therefore considering the backlink a quality one boosting your organic ranking. Having backlinks from a different source than your existing ones is essential because there is a high correlation in the organic ranking to websites with many unique backlinks. With that being said, it is much better for your sites SEO to have 10 backlinks from 10 different sites than 100 links from 2 different websites. Lastly paid links, paid links are not necessarily all bad as they can help boost your pages SEO in the long run, but these links come with a risk non paid ones do not come with. Paying for backlinks to improve your website’s ranking goes against most major search engines guidelines and if caught sites can be punished for it, so stay away from these types of backlinks.
The other principal ranking factoring when it comes to being ranked in 2019 is having a mobile-friendly website. Believe it, or not, more people use mobile web browsing than desktop browsing. This has caused some significant changes with how Google has started to rank websites over time. According to hostingfacts.com, 52.2% of all internet traffic came from mobile devices in 2018 overtaking desktop traffic. As well the bounce rate on mobile, when someone leaves the website after only viewing one page, decreased 9% while the desktop bounce rate stayed the same. The mobile experience of the site is everything when it comes to having top-notch SEO.
Conclusion
The main things to you want to make sure your website does on mobile are as follows, whether the site is responsive and resizes to fit whatever size device it is on. Whether your site has large enough fonts so they can be read with ease even on the smallest of mobile screens. Being able to navigate through the website with ease and having easily accessible menus. Lastly making sure no site content is hidden by ads you have possibly placed within your website. In 2020 if you focus your SEO efforts on building and finding quality backlinks while optimizing your site for the mobile experience to the best of your ability Google should reward you the great honor of being on the first page of their search results.
Here at Farshore, we have helped companies with little to no website traffic move to become booming online businesses through optimized SEO. In 2019 online presence is everything and people are coming up with new ways to utilize SEO every day. To stay ahead of the pack or to grow your online foot traffic reach out for a phone call so we can help you learn more about SEO and how it can help your company!
My name is Dino and I am highly passionate about Marketing, Native marketing, Performance marketing, Digital Marketing, New Technologies, Mobile Content, SMO, SEO … It’s a long list! As a digital marketer, I have the exciting opportunity to see new technologies rising and making an impact on our lives! The future is now!
