SEO strategy

Ways to Increase Your Customer Base with Search Engine Optimization

In order to survive, your business needs to grow. Most of that growth will come from attracting new customers. There are many strategies you can employ to expand your reach. But in the digital age, one of the most effective ones has to be SEO. If you learn how to increase your customer base with search engine optimization, you can grow your business effectively and affordably. But before you see the results, you need to do the legwork. So how can you use SEO to get more customers?

What is search engine optimization, and why is it important?

Search engine optimization or SEO is the collection of different tactics that make your website more visible in search engine results for select keywords. SEO can be done both on-page and off-page. Some of the on-page strategies include speeding up the website, using the right keywords in website content, and optimizing for mobile devices, while the most common and effective off-page strategy is backlinks. The combination of these tactics improves the ranking of the website in search engine results. This, in turn, increases the quantity and quality of traffic your website gets. Better traffic gives you a better chance of converting visitors into customers, which is exactly what you need to grow your business.

Search engine optimization helps you improve your website traffic.

How can you increase your customer base with search engine optimization?

SEO targets unpaid, organic traffic coming from search engines (primarily Google). Therefore, the direct goal of an SEO strategy is not to increase sales or even retain existing customers. So how does SEO help increase your customer base?

Attract more customers

How did your existing customers find out about your business? Some will have seen your marketing; others may have walked by a physical location (if you have one) on the way to and from work. But a significant number of them probably just Googled something related to your business and found you online. Then, your website convinced them to become a customer. So it stands to reason that by attracting more visitors to your website, SEO helps you reach and potentially convert more people. Furthermore, because SEO is about attracting quality traffic, it’ll also improve your chances of conversion.

Build a brand

SEO will help you rank for your chosen keywords. This means that you can target the searches you want to be associated with. If you, for example, want to be known as a green, sustainable, and eco-friendly business, you should improve your ranking for keywords related to such practices. Over time, your business will become associated with the searches you rank for – that is what your brand will become.

Branding is all about building an identity for your business.

Become more visible in local searches

If you’re running an online-only business whose products or services are available all over the world, you won’t care where your customers come from. But most businesses only have a limited geographic reach. You either have a physical location, or you serve a particular area. Either way, you want the people in your area to become your customers. You can achieve this by improving your local SEO. You’ll appear in searches related to or performed in your service area, which will attract customers to your physical location because it’s convenient for them to shop with you.

What to do when you’re trying to increase your customer base with search engine optimization

When done right, SEO is a very high return-on-investment marketing strategy. So if your goal is to increase your customer base, what is the right way to do SEO?

Produce good content

High-quality content is a must for a good SEO strategy. It’ll help you rank higher, become established as an expert in your niche, and attract more backlinks – all good things for your SEO. But perhaps more importantly, it’ll shape how potential customers think of you. If you have no content on your website, you’ll be suspicious. If you have bad content on your website, they won’t think your business is worth their money. But if you have content they like, they’ll trust you and be willing to spend on your products or services.

Use the right keywords

You will never be able to convert every single person into a customer – that’s why every business has a target demographic. To ensure that your SEO efforts are attracting this specific demographic, you need to carefully choose the keywords you rank for. Otherwise, you’ll get a lot of useless traffic that only harms you in the long run by increasing your bounce and abandonment rate. So ask yourself which searches give you the best chance of attracting and then converting the right person. Then, target those keywords specifically.

Choosing the right keywords is essential for any SEO strategy.

Focus on user experience

People who find your content boring, your website difficult to navigate, and your products irrelevant to their needs are unlikely to become customers. So you want to provide your users with the best possible experience; this increases your chance of converting them and then retaining them as a customer. So ask yourself what your customers want and then try to meet their needs. This question is not difficult to answer when you don’t have a lot of customers. But with an expanding customer base come some difficulties – you’ll have some very different people looking for some very different things. Luckily, CRM is a useful tool for dealing with this. Using CRM, you’ll be able to build customer profiles, keep track of each customer’s interaction with the business, and personalize their experience. This considerably improves user satisfaction.

Be patient

SEO is a very effective way to improve your visibility and increase your traffic. But that doesn’t happen overnight. You won’t go from being on page 20 of Google search results to being at the top of the first page in a few days. Instead, you’ll need to work for weeks, even months, to see serious results. So don’t be discouraged. Give your strategy some time to work. If you’re patient and persistent, you can significantly increase your customer base with search engine optimization. But you cannot give up if that doesn’t happen immediately!

Step-by-step SEO guide for 2021

When we talk about search engine optimization, it all comes down to creating an effective SEO strategy. The approach you take will directly influence the outcome. Now that online businesses profit the most, it is even more important to do this the right way. With that in mind, here is a helpful step-by-step SEO guide for 2021.

Coming up with a good SEO strategy

Doing SEO is more complex than you would initially think. If you don’t have a good strategic approach, you won’t be able to accomplish much. First, you need to create a solid plan about what you are trying to achieve. Then, you need to outline the most critical points of the plan. After that, we get to the implementation process. There are no workarounds. If you want to increase your organic traffic, there is a blueprint you need to follow.

Understanding SEO

There are two main types of search engine optimization:

on-page SEO;
off-page SEO.

Before you start anything, make sure you understand the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.

In a few simple words, on-page optimization involves every element you can physically include in your website. Examples are keywords, keyphrases, title tags, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, internal links, etc.

Opposite to that, off-page search engine optimization deals with things that are not directly on your website. That includes link-building strategies, social media sharing, brand building, guest posts, and so on.

To properly do optimization, you need to combine both of these SEO types. Luckily, this step-by-step SEO guide for 2021 will teach you how!

Start with a list of keywords

To create this guide, we spoke with a few SEO expert companies. According to wpfullcare.com, having a list of keywords is a good start. The list consists of short keywords and long keywords, where short ones usually have one or two words, and long ones have three or more. Keep in mind that longer keywords have less competition, so that might be a good way to create something unique that will point to your website.

Type in a few ideas in the search bar and see where that takes you. Play with combinations of words and try to come up with something simple but memorable. Having a list of 10 keywords is a good start.

Analyze your competitors on Google’s first page

When you have the list of your ten keywords, do a search query and look at the top 10 results. Google’s first page will show you competitor companies that already use those keywords. The goal here is to change a couple of combinations and improve the keywords so they describe your company more precisely. For example, the “shoes for men” keyword is not specific enough. However, if you add more words to it, like the location, age group, and category, you will come up with something more unique.

Remember that you need to spend some time playing with different combinations to see what works best for your website.

Optimize for voice search

Voice search was viral in 2020, and that trend is continuing in 2021. With that in mind, optimizing your website for voice search is crucial. It can bring you an edge over your competitors.

Focus on local SEO

The pandemic created a gap between people. Everyone is focusing on their local retailers because they are the closest. Furthermore, even if there weren’t the pandemic, you would still need to work more on your local SEO before expanding your business. You need a strong base before you tap into other markets.

On-page strategies will help you improve your local SEO, and that’s where your focus should be. This is an extensive topic. However, as long as you understand the gist of it, you will know what to do.

All of your keywords, titles, headings, and other on-page SEO elements should include location. Use the city name or even neighborhood. Let’s go back to the previous example of the “shoes for men” keyword. The phrase will be more impactful if it says “shoes for man LA

.” You need to optimize all of your content to be location-specific.

Optimize content to reflect search intent

The content you produce must fit into a category of whatever people are looking for. There is a reason why some articles do better than others. For example, 99% of the time, people need an answer to a question. Formulate your titles so that they reflect what people search for.

Furthermore, people tend to like lists more than walls of text. They are easier to read and more concise.

Here is an example of how to improve a title. If you come up with something like “SEO tips and tricks for your website”, that title will do okay. However, if you change it to “30 best SEO tips and tricks”, it will do much better. Understand the intent of people, and you will be able to give them what they want.

Link building, link profiles, and content sharing

The final part of this step-by-step SEO guide for 2021 is understanding how to increase website traffic and ranking. We need to discuss three terms:

link profiles;
link building;
content sharing.

A link profile includes different types of links you must have on your website. They directly influence your rating. For example, a good link profile means you have a mix of relevant local and industry-specific backlinks and a balanced ratio between natural strong and weak links.

Once you understand link profiles, you will know how to properly do link building. Just avoid all paid forms of links or link farms because you need organic traffic.

Content sharing will help you in this. Utilize social media platforms and your customer base. By creating shareable content, you can use this type of SEO to build a brand and increase awareness about your business.

A step-by-step SEO guide for 2021 made easy

We hope that this step-by-step SEO guide for 2021 has everything you need to improve your website. Remember to take your time, focus on your clients’ needs, and mix different strategies to find the best approach. SEO cannot be done overnight; it is a process you need to revisit every week.