Your website is a beautiful online representation of your business. Research has indicated that a well-designed website will generate more interest from traffic and cause them to spend more time than a poorly looking one. This also means a higher opportunity for creating high revenue. Imagine the frustrated feeling upon seeing a competitor’s website with better looks and knowing that it is reaching higher goals than your website. You have to admit it is a little envy. This is also known as serving the purpose. Seeing a thing may look and sound easy, but it is difficult to get the desired effects or goals. The top success of a website, although depending on the aims, can be measured by effectiveness. This effectiveness can be in the form of sales, online sharing; goodness knows there are lots of things to be shared, and many more. Now that you know SEO is an entry to better sales, an effective SEO can blend a beautiful online presence and great ROI. With the things getting better until here, we have realized the benefits of a beautiful online presence.
Looks are a subjective thing. Elements that contribute to it vary from individual to individual and may depend on the mood of the person. For example, a person may think that white is a stupendous shade for a car, while another person may think it is a dumb idea because dirt is quite evident on the car. But there are also some well-known general statements about looks too. It’s always said that the first impression counts and it’s the most important one. Now, the first impression doesn’t always mean meeting a person in real life. It could be just by looking at something. This is comparable to visiting a website. When a person clicks on a website, the first thing that will bypass their mind is the look of the website. This initial impression will directly affect the person’s opinion of the website. Step two could be navigation, load time, and so on, but we won’t go into that. Now you have a potential client with SEO that has stumbled upon your website. Remember that there is this factor called return on investment. With the right rate, spending on SEO can probably bring higher returns. However, when an SEO service is inadequate for your preferences and variety of customers, there’s only going to be disappointments and a waste of money. This will lead us to feel that the rate on SEO companies is steep. Although it may be quite expensive, you have to think that you have the opportunity of failure at advertising your merchandise at a loss to a point where a single sale could not even cover the charges for the month.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term tactic that makes your site more search engine friendly and improves how your site ranks with search engines. Its major objective is to generate more site visitors and thereby create internet leads. With only a couple of new clients coming in a year, your business can generate greater sales. What’s even more important than sales is that these leads will allow you to build a business. It’s this step so often skipped in business that’s why a business fails. Extra sales are excellent, but most companies can’t manage more sales. More sales while building a well business is even better. The internet has become an essential part of people’s lives. Let’s admit it, it is not only used for research but also as a form of entertainment too. You can search and pick up numerous things on the internet; from toy figurines to buying antiques, the internet has it all. This results in people starting to have a desire to buy and/or sell something on the internet. Now when you have a product that needs to be sold, look what you have just discovered. That is right, it’s a new potential marketplace. With the right techniques in place, you can take advantage of this market.
Why SEO is important for home decor businesses
There is a lot to learn here. The process which will ensure people reach your website is called search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is a series of methods and strategies aimed at increasing the likelihood of someone finding your website when using a search engine. The most widely used search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. When potential customers are interested in purchasing products similar to yours, they may often use search engines to compare prices, read product reviews, and research the products in general. SEO helps to target these potential customers or “traffic” to your website.
Imagine this scenario. You have recently started a business producing and selling unique, hand-crafted home decor. You know there is a market for your products, but you are having a hard time tapping into it. You have tried attending local fairs and placing advertisements in newspapers with little success. A friend mentions that you should look into selling your products on the internet. You do some research and find that creating a website would be a great way to open a new sales channel. A website would provide an easy way for people to access information and purchase your products at any time of day. However, you have no idea where to start. What can you do to ensure that potential customers will be able to find your site?
Benefits of a beautiful online presence
Improves credibility: A well-designed website can help you present your products or services to your target audience in a more professional way, making it easier to attract them and turn them into customers. The addition of alternative text to photos will ensure that your site is a step ahead with improved SEO, leading to more traffic and a higher rank. Often businesses can severely damage their brand and business success by choosing the wrong hosting company. An example of this would be using a “free hosting” company. Several of these companies have poor uptime and support, as well as having your site littered with the host’s advertisements, and in some cases a popup ad when your site loads. A poor quality site can often be the only thing needed to destroy a company. “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” – what is the impression your website gives off? Brings in more sales: Whether you’re trying to get your product out to the masses, sell it to individual consumers, or make money by having your visitors click on ads – it’s all about the numbers. The more people that see your product or service, the more sales you will make. By reaching its customers online, a business can generate significantly more revenue than its offline revenue, and make a positive ROI on the money and time spent creating an SEO friendly website. A good example of this is found in companies that manufacture computer software. There are no shipping or handling costs for a product that can be downloaded, so the extra revenue goes directly to the bottom line. If you’re trying to sell a product to a customer, the customer is much more likely to buy it when they can easily find information about the product, and locate your offline store by looking up directions on their smartphone. High quality websites and SEO can target these customers far more effectively than outdated methods.
Optimizing Your Website
This manual will cope with off-page SEO because although on-page ‘basics’ for the duration of the internet site construct section are crucial, those are regularly quite well known and self-explanatory, and it’s far off-page SEO which will make or spoil an internet marketing campaign.
Whilst AdWords may be an powerful building stage for beau-coup click-throughs, the value might be prohibitive for non-carrying out a long-tail SEO campaign in maximum instances. Consequently, strengthening organic traffic is important, and the earlier an SEO campaign comes into play, the higher given SEO can take a few months to reveal huge effects, particularly inside the extra competitive industries.
For small decorators, SEO becomes now not only crucial, but additionally could properly be the maximum value-powerful choice as conventional advertising keeps to say no. Design businesses were centered, and as a end result, the potentialities of comfy referrals has dwindled; that is why search engines like google and yahoo are simply now and again the first vicinity humans look for an indoors decorator. With such a lot of enterprise possibilities online, it’d be a pity to overlook out virtually due to the loss of a mature search engine marketing campaign.
Keyword research and optimization
For example, a website selling candle holders for walls may choose the keyword “Wall sconces”. Now this keyword is quite broad and will carry a heavy competition. A website specializing in handcrafted iron sconces could certainly try for this keyword, but it may be more worthwhile to choose a more specific keyword relating to the product such as “handcrafted iron wall sconces”. Go even further and there are local search terms “handcrafted iron wall sconces in (place)”. The more specific the keyword and less competition will mean an easier ranking and better-targeted traffic. Always keep your customers in mind, what would they type into a search engine to find the products you are offering?
Keyword research is the vital first step in helping to accurately target the products you wish to show up in search engines. It sounds easy, but a great deal of thought needs to be put into what your primary keywords will be. Choose the wrong keywords and you will be trying to attract traffic from search engines to your website, but people who land will not be looking for what you are offering. Choose keywords that are too competitive and it will be difficult to achieve a top ranking, choose keywords that have low traffic and you may find it not worth the effort to achieve the ranking.
Creating high-quality content
High-quality content also has a high probability of being shared on social media websites or linked to from other websites. This is a common goal in SEO to draw in links; however, this will happen naturally if you have created high-quality content that is resourceful to your audience. High-quality content has longevity and will generate traffic long after being archived. It is definitely something to focus on when you have SEO in mind.
In terms of search engine optimization, high-quality content contributes to a strong presence and is an effective way to build sustainable SEO. When you create high-quality content, you want to aim at providing something that is resourceful to the audience. Think about what the visitor wants to see, not what you want them to see. This will always ensure that your content is focused and relevant.
High-quality content is an important aspect in online marketing. This generally means when you are in the process of creating content; either it be a webpage, forum post, article, press release, blog post, video, etc., you have taken the time to create something of value. Something that is authoritative, unique, informative, and engaging. High-quality content is often used as a reliable marketing tool to build and maintain brand awareness.
Optimizing website speed and performance
High-resolution images and abundant embedded media are often big contributors to slow web pages. Image file sizes can be optimized through compressing them while still retaining good quality. There is software available that can rescale, recompress, and reformat images automatically if editing each individual image is too time-consuming. This will help to reduce bandwidth and both mobile and desktop users’ data usage. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers distributed across several locations. This helps to more efficiently deliver content to users around the world, as the server with the fewest network hops will deliver the content, enhancing site performance. CDNs are particularly effective in loading content such as images and JavaScript files.
Loading time is a crucial performance metric as it directly impacts user experience and your SERP rankings. Most users are unlikely to return to a website that gives a poor performance, and around 40% would abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Google takes page speed into account through its ranking algorithms, thus impacting how visible and how high up your page is on search results. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) are a great way for businesses to create mobile-optimized, faster-loading content. These are stripped-down versions of your web page that are designed to load nearly instantly on mobile devices. Google stores and serves AMP pages from its own servers to ensure fast load times. AMP is particularly useful for high-volume content websites such as blogs and news websites, as this content is most likely to be shared on social media and externally.
Building Backlinks and Online Reputation
A backlink is considered as a vote from another site to your site. So, more backlinks can be interpreted as a site being more important. And if those backlinks are coming from related sites, those backlinks are also raising a website’s relevance in a particular area. This will be very helpful for a home interior website to ensure more importance and relevance from Google’s perspective by getting more backlinks from home decor or other related sites. Because of its importance, building backlinks is a must to consider in home decor SEO.
A backlink is simply a link to your website from another site. It’s different from an outbound link from your site to others. For a backlink, you’d want to have as many links from other sites to your site as possible, the more the better. And you’d want those links to be in-text, not simply recognized in an image type of link. But not all backlinks are good. Backlinks from high PR and relevant sites to your site will be worth more than low PR and irrelevant sites. And sometimes Google will penalize your site for a considerably low-quality backlink.
Google uses several parameters to evaluate a website. One of them is evaluating the site’s authority by calculating the PageRank. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used to measure the website’s relative importance within the internet. And the most influential parameter in this algorithm is backlink.
Importance of backlinks for SEO
Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO still matters. In fact, most SEO experts believe that off-page optimization is more important when trying to rank a website. Backlinks are pretty much the foundation of off-page SEO. Any on-page SEO methods performed are mostly done to make it easier for the search engine to crawl the website, rather than to influence the ranking of the website. Any website that ranks high without backlinks will rank even higher with a good backlink strategy.
Search engines see backlinks as a vote for the website. The more votes a website has, the more credibility it has with the search engines. Generally, the more backlinks a website has, the higher the website will rank. This is not the case with all search engines, however. I have seen some search engines put more emphasis on the quality of backlinks as opposed to the quantity of backlinks. Yahoo, for example, puts much more emphasis on the quality of backlinks.
The importance of backlinks has been a topic up for debate for some time. Some say that if you can just get your website indexed in the search engines, the backlinks will just come naturally. However, I have seen enough evidence in organic search results to believe that backlinks are still crucial to the ranking of a website, which leads into the next topic.
Strategies to build backlinks for home decor businesses
Press release – This is a tried and tested method of gaining exposure for your business. Whether you decide to do it yourself or hire a writer, make sure that the content reads well. Remember, this won’t just be read by people, but potentially by software such as Google bots as well. If you have something new or unique about your home decor business, such as a special event or a unique product, that’s your angle. For example, “BRE launches exciting new range of decorative waterproof wall panels” is certain to attract attention.
Guest posting – Write an article on another website and have it published. The key to success with this strategy is to have a clear correlation of your home decor businesses. For example, statistics on house-related crime could be a perfect match for a security company. If you don’t have contacts with bloggers or higher ranking website owners, a good place to start is with websites such as My Blog Guest. This is a website solely created for the purpose of connecting bloggers to one another in the hopes of gaining exposure and traffic.
Managing online reviews and reputation
A good place to start is to make sure all information about your business on these sites is accurate and up-to-date. Then, try to make comments on reviews, thanking customers for their feedback, both positive and negative. This is so customers know you are listening and that their feedback is valued. After this, the aim would be to try and sway any negative reviews. There are limitations with this; however, as a general rule of thumb, if the review is one or fewer stars, the customer is unhappy and they are not likely to change their opinion.
To manage your online reputation, you need to know when and where people are talking about your business. This means setting up alerts on search engines with your business name and monitoring review sites, such as your Yelp business page, as well as directories and social networks. You can optimize this process by using customer feedback tools such as Feefo, Epinions, and Bazaarvoice.
Effective reputation management can play a critical role in helping you to get more search traffic and attract more customers. The concept is fairly straightforward: it is often the reviews which your customers leave that will largely determine your stature in search engines. Up to 10% of ranking algorithms in search engines may be based upon the sentiment of reviews. With more positive reviews, your business will have a higher standing in organic search results.
Local SEO and Social Media Marketing
Even harder than local SEO is capturing the market for local search on search engines. When a customer uses a search engine to look for a service, they will often see a map with a listing of the top 3 companies that offer that service. This touch of the map is a direct link to the location and a very valuable source of advertising for a local business. This is also very commonly used for mobile phone searches, so having a mobile-ready site and building geo-specific mobile ads is a key upcoming strategy for local SEO. The best way to get on the map is to have a functioning website that is relevant to the search with a good number of reviews on Google or other local review sites. High ratings and reviews are a good way to optimize the brand and promote clicks into the company site. Once a customer on the internet has clicked into a business on the map, it is common that they will check and see if there is an official site for the business. Using this, the business can promote the conversion of local search into sales as the customer is about to find a quick guide for the location of the business and what they offer. This method is slower and may take a few months to pay off, but getting on the map can be a very valuable long-term source of new customers.
I’m mobileLemma to add a Capturing the Competitive Local Search Market by mobileLemma to my topics under the local tab_on-site of your how to add a site map video. An effective tactic is to add the geo-location of your business somewhere in the footer of your page. This will help to add relevance to your location when search engine crawlers index your site. The best approach for developing local keywords is to implement research and trial and error. Often times it is difficult to predict exactly what a customer will type into a search engine when looking for areas. Develop a list of keywords and checkpoint rankings frequently to gauge what is or is not working. Another means of developing content that is focused on the local area is by creating separate pages for different locations that your business covers. This could be an effective tactic for larger businesses that offer services across multiple areas. Static Index and the Dynamic locator are gaining popularity amongst companies to have an easy-to-use interface for customers to find the nearest location to them. These locators primarily involve JavaScript development and are an effective way to make the user experience easy and beneficial for the customer. Another angle to take for companies developing local content is to assess the activities of their competitors and finding out what strategies have or have not worked for them. This can often serve as a shortcut for finding out what implementation methods are most effective.
When it comes to the local customer base, effective targeting is essential, resulting in a substantial increase in sales and visibility. The plan for targeting local customers can vary depending on how large your business is and how many people you can afford to have working on SEO. The more aggressive the approach in going after a local customer base, the faster your SEO strategy will pay off, so long as it is done correctly. The key to a local SEO strategy is developing content that is keyword-rich and focused on the local area of its customer base. An example would be a local flooring business developing content that is aimed at the best flooring options for new homes in Colorado Springs. The business has a much better chance of ranking closer to the top of a search engine and getting a new customer because the keyword is focused and not broad. Developing geo-specific keywords can be achieved in a number of ways, both on-page and on-site.
Targeting local customers through SEO
Now one of the most important local search engine strategies is to make sure your business is listed on Google’s My Business, which was the new version of Google Places. This is a free listing that is offered for businesses and it shows your business’ location on the map in search results and can also show details about your business. This listing can easily be optimized to generate a high amount of leads. Often a lot of home decorators do not bother to do this, so it can be that added advantage. Most of what is done in SEO to optimize a website can also be done on the My Business page and it also has the option to add photos and posts which can be used as a marketing technique.
With local businesses, at times there is no need to be concerned with the global market when your market is actually your area. So the best thing to use is local search engine optimization. This is particularly useful for small businesses that are only able to serve a certain area. The great thing about local search is that it is often less competitive and easier to capitalize on. People often look for home decorators in their location and frequently much of this is done through the web. Making sure your website is search engine optimized for specific local keywords can bring plenty of local leads. For example, it is not difficult to optimize a website for “home decorator Brisbane”. This will often generate a high amount of local leads even if the website gets little traffic overall. This brings added on page 1 optimization, which could be a phone number link with “call now” for mobile users. Most AdWords campaigns now are targeted around location. So you will also be able to use plenty of your keyword research and data from AdWords campaigns.
Utilizing social media platforms for promotion
Creating a Facebook page is worthwhile. It is simple to make, easy to maintain, and highly effective. Studies have shown that Facebook is the most influential form of social media on local buying decisions. It’s a great way to keep local customers informed of store information, such as changes in operating hours, etc. Using geo-targeted Facebook ads also proves to bring valuable traffic to a store’s website. These ads are shown to people within the local area and have a high conversion rate. Another method would be running specific promotions that are only available for Facebook customers. This helps build a loyal customer base and gives an incentive for future purchases.
Considering the increasing dependency of society on the internet, specifically social media, social media becomes an avenue where local businesses not only get most of their customers’ information but also present a great opportunity for promotion. Social media is a high-tech form of word-of-mouth. Traditionally, small businesses survived via word-of-mouth feedback from regular customers and good reviews within the local community. With social media platforms, small businesses can now have an automated word-of-mouth process potentially reaching thousands of people. Here are a few methods to use social media for local SEO.
Engaging with the local community
This creates a platform for a soft-sell, building awareness and trust in a product. There are many different ways to engage with the local community and they will all improve your website’s search engine rankings. Some of the most effective ways are: – Sponsorship of local charity events
– Participation in local events: Markets, tradeshows, festival and the like
– Partnerships with other local businesses – Donations to local clubs, schools or organisations.
Local businesses are often the backbone of a community. They provide character and individuality to a town or suburb. An important facet to running a local business is engaging with the local community. People are more likely to purchase from a business that they trust. One of the main ways to build this trust comes from being involved with the local community. Engaging with the local community will also create an opportunity to introduce the local community to your business and what you have to offer in a non-threatening manner.
