Marketing today is very different the marketing of decades gone by. The biggest change of all has been the influence of the internet on the business world. Thanks to smart phones, people can connect to the internet from nearly anywhere at any time. Businesses need to keep this in mind. In regards to the internet, search engines are still the tool internet users implement to find the information they desire. As such, search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is vitally impotent to your long term marketing strategies.
Go Local with Your SEO
In regards to building an SEO strategy that can last, one of the best pieces of advice you can use is to localize your SEO. This is especially the case if you have brick and mortar operations. 76 percent of consumers that perform a local search visit a local business within one day. Making sure you take where you are geographically located into account in your SEO is a winning strategy.
Realize Search Engine Algorithms Evolve
Just because your SEO works today does not mean it will be effective in the future. Instead, you must try to stay flexible in regards to your SEO strategies. They need to be updated on a routine basis. This is due, in part, to how often the search engine algorithms used by Google, Bing and others are updated. The rules Google uses to rank websites today are not the same as the rules they have used in the past.
Stay on Top of Consumer Trends
Another thing you need to factor into a successful long term SEO strategy is that consumer trends are also in a constant state of evolution. This is why you should never get too married to a given set of keywords and keyword phrases. Eventually, they may fall out of popularity. How consumers use search engines is also changing. In the past, most people performed searches on PCs. Today, smart phones dominate internet search.
Focus on User Experience
Google and other search engines don’t like being gamed by cheap attempts to gain a good ranking on their platforms. Instead, they are putting an increasingly large emphasis on the user experience. Google and others want to make sure search engine users actually find what they are looking for in regards to quality content. They also want websites that are easy to navigate. As such, you must make crafting a quality user experience a priority in your web design.
Overall, SEO can be very complex. It’s not something that you address once and forget about. Instead, having successful long term SEO requires constantly monitoring changes in your web traffic as well as different factors such as how consumers use the internet and how search engine algorithms are updated. It must be an ongoing process.