Search Engine Optimization: Best Practices & Examples
“On a broad scale I see SEO becoming a normalized marketing tactic, the same way TV, radio, and print are traditionally thought of as marketing tactics.” © Duane Forrester
The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices are vital in order to survive in the modern competitive business world. To stand out of the crowd, businesses all over the world need to put enormous efforts by developing a comprehensive thought-out strategy, taking into account the company’s major goals, preferences of targeted audience, and ‘rules’ of search engines. Today we will introduce to the key benefits of SEO for business, best examples of optimized websites and present few very interesting statistics. Let’s get started!
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Key Benefits of SEO practices
SEO Helps You Stand Out from Your Competitors
On the first page of a SERP (search engine results page), there are up to six paid positions, three map listings, and 10 organic listings. If you can align your keyword strategy to appear in a paid listing, a map listing, and an organic listing, you’re increasing your likelihood of a site visit and decreasing the likelihood of a searcher clicking to visit your competitors.
Take Your Business to the Next Level
SEO can bring it thousands upon thousands of visitors to your website a day. This may put your company in a position of needing to expand to a larger web server to accommodate the traffic and sales to your website. Your customers may recommend you a product or service that they were looking for when they visited your website. SEO is a really great investment for your company and could be what you need to take it to the next level.
We all know how important Quality Score is for PPC campaigns. But, did you know that Quality Score and the content on your website go hand-in-hand? A good SEO strategy includes creating pages on your website for your products and services and using relevant keywords through your site. By aligning your text ad messages to the content on your website or driving PPC traffic to relevant landing pages (like a page for a specific product or service), you can improve your Quality Score, which can, in turn, reduce your cost per click and improve the performance of your pay-per-click advertising.
SEO Boosts the Effectiveness of Your Other Marketing Efforts
Because of an increased market share in SERPs (search engine results pages) with SEO, you can boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts like PPC and retargeting. For example, coupling SEO and search advertising can improve traffic by 50%. Coupling SEO and retargeting can increase brand awareness. You can also use the insights from your SEO strategy to fine-tune your PPC campaigns – if you have keywords that are performing well for your
organic search, you can add those to your PPC campaigns and test whether or not performance improves.
The Results are Low Cost
Organic listings are essentially free. When you are listed at the top, you don’t need to pay per click or allocate a budget for business advertising, one of the main benefits of SEO is that it is the gift that keeps on giving. With a little bit of effort you can watch your website get consistent traffic. You don’t have to pay $10 for every person who clicks on your ad. Unlike
pay-per-click advertising, your traffic will not drop to nothing when it stops. SEO gets rid of the need to have thousands of ads across the web.
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3 Great Examples of Best SEO Practices
Have a look and get inspired by new ideas!
Cloudbakers, optimizes SEO through a strong homepage. The page contains a strong call to action (CTA) as well as keyword links that link to content on their other pages. This design gives the company more opportunities for their site to be found by providing specific keywords that are easy to locate because of their page placement and will increase page ranking in results.
Why it's exceptional:
- Direct call to action: "Talk to someone who does"
- Secondary call to action: The three thought bubbles below the main CTA link directly to their products page, allowing the user to learn more information if they're not ready to talk to someone, as suggested by the primary CTA.
Marketing campaigns often create a big bang, but they all too often lose momentum and fizzle away. MuleSoft, an integration software company, recognizes that sustainable and impressive results come not only from campaign activity, but from the continual application of technology and continued iteration of marketing best practices.
Still, easier said than done. To keep campaign momentum going, MuleSoft’s digital marketing team invested in a smart integration strategy, achieving great results when all of their
digital channels where working together. For starters, their SEO team altered their metadata structure and audience segments, resulting in a hefty increase in organic traffic to their website. Their marketing leads instituted real-time personalization, and their social team increased revenue a whopping 115% through expanding Account Based Marketing (ABM) efforts. They also prioritized creating a top lead-converting asset by recycling old assets into a long-form book. The results? You guessed it: stellar sales and revenue performance.
In addition to killing their integrated marketing game, they also aren’t afraid to go behind-the-scenes and write about their culture, too. Don’t miss one of our favorite blog posts: Putting our culture of innovation into practice.
Why it's exceptional:
- Good H1 tag: "Transform your business with API-led connectivity"
- Very prominent call to action: "Get Anypoint Platform"
Another strong example of SEO success would be Mouseflow, a tech company that uses an online customer tracking heatmap software that facilitates a clear analyzation of a user’s online experience. The Mouseflow home page has strong on-page optimization, with a clear and relevant H1 tag along with an effective call to action. The page is full of relevant keywords which equate to higher SERP ratings. This provides an insightful framework that many other websites can follow in order to construct a SEO -friendly website.
Why it's exceptional:
- Good H1 tag: "Do You Understand Your Visitors?"
- Good H2 (including bolded words) that also serves as a concise description of the product
- Eye-catching call to action (the video and also within the main navigation bar)
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Mind-Blowing SEO Statistics You Have Not Heard About!
- Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day
- 50% of search queries are four words or longer
- 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine
- The first organic search result will get nearly 33% of clicks
- 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results
- High-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search
- Long-form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content
- Marketers see SEO as becoming more effective, with 82% reporting effectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating effectiveness is increasing significantly
- In 2018, the average firm is expected to allocate 41% of their marketing budget to online, and this rate is expected to grow to 45% by 2020
Conclusion
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial aspect of the company’s success in the online business world. Despite of the fact that SEO does not brings fast results, consider it as a long-term investment giving unbelievable ROI in the future. Highly-qualified SEO specialists are of a great demand nowadays, and our team members are those you are looking for!
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