Finding a good strategic partner for your business can be real hard work. With your digital online strategy, if you find a good agency or developer, it can take you to the best places and likewise if you end up with a bad one, it will be one hell of a ride.
So here are a few things that can be really handy to know if you are new in business, and thinking of going online.
Domain Age Matter in SEO
Google considers domain age as one of the ranking factors. So in general that means if your website or domain is new under 1 year old, it will take more work to rank in SEO. Overtime as authority is built up, Google puts more trust on your domain, website and brand.
Domain age does send some signal for Google to trust the website a bit more as older websites have more trust signals. Trust signals include domain age, backlinks profile, reputation etc. This doesn’t mean all the websites that are older rank higher. Quality and consistency is the main key factor.
So what to do when your website is new?
Keep in mind Search Engine Optimization is a long game. Never rush or take shortcuts, else the penalty given by Google is hard to recover.
There are several penalties Google sanction for doing wrong thing such as:
- De-indexing the page
- De-indexing whole site
Patience is key in long term SEO goals. Here are few things you can do when your website is new:
- Provide user useful contents to the user
- Implement good on-page SEO
- Implement good technical SEO
How to market
There are two strategies that you can implement marketing your website when it is new.
Strategy 1, if you want brand visibility and start to build traffic to your website, you can start with AdWords. Adwords is the best way to build brand awareness as well as traffic when the website is relatively new. Adwords can be costly though, and you have to make a decision if it fits in your marketing strategies. Think of Adwords as a short term investment to start with. If all campaigns go as expected, it can be part of long term strategies too.
Strategy 2, will be organic SEO. Organic SEO is a long term strategy, and includes various strategies such as On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, Content marketing etc. As tedious as it sounds, Organic SEO if done right is the key for long term success for your business.
Good quality website helps in SEO
Good quality website goes above and beyond to rank your website. So, this is where your main priority should be. Getting a well optimized website should be a top priority for any new businesses.
So what CMS or platform will be best for SEO? Based on my experience, WordPress is by far the best platform when it comes to SEO.
What does WordPress make such a great option for SEO? Here are some of the main reasons why WordPress is the best:
- Easy to use permalinks
- Content hierarchy or website architecture
- Internal link buildings
- Tons of plugins that help in adding schema markup for examples
- Well built website loads fasters and score good web vital scores and loading speed
I will put a good WordPress Developer on top of my list. And I will also look for extra skills such as website design, SEO services etc. I will be the right person to say this as I have ranked websites for high competitive keywords just based on development and design alone. What I am saying here is a good developer with SEO experience, can help you go a lot higher in SEO.
How do you make sure your website is the best?
Personally for me this is the most critical decision business owners have to make. From my experience, I can tell you that websites that are built properly will help you generate organic traffic. I have ranked so many of my clients in organic SEO with zero or very limited budget on page number 1 for various keywords, some of them are highly competitive keywords costing as much as 25 AUD per clicks. Of course, this didn't happen in a few months, but websites built with solid foundations do rank.
Content is still THE KING
Content is still THE KING of SEO. No doubt about it. With all the invention around AI and auto generated content, there has never been a better time to spend more time on unique content. With the most recent core update, Google had been strict around these auto generated AI content and so many websites got penalized heavily with some websites getting de-indexed completely.
Content should be focused around your main target audience. Knowing your target audience better is the core of your content strategy. If you don’t know your audience, you may not build good content planning. Writing unique targeted contents helps you generate more traffic to your website which in turn will generate more conversions and revenue for your business.
So how do you make sure the website has good content?
In order to write good content, you have to know your audience first. The better the data about audiences the better the content you will write. When writing continent, make sure you answer questions that your audiences will be looking at. It's always good to have a solid content writer in the team who knows your business inside out. And you will also need to have a good tone of voice.
Good content strategy helps you convert visitors into customers and create a good loyal customer base.
Keeping an eye
One thing I have found is that most of the business owners don't keep track of what's going on their SEO progress. Getting in touch with your agency or developer regularly and tracking progress of the strategy is critical for your SEO success.
And also if you aren't provided monthly reporting around the strategies, you should be asking for it. Making sure you are provided monthly updates about the strategies should be number 1 priority when you hire a SEO service.
Case Studies
I actively test my websites. In the past few months I have found, the way Google works has changed significantly. Just to let you know, the websites I built are mostly Australian based, and SEO targets are mostly local and within Australia.
In one of the websites I have tested, Google crawled all the pages almost within a day. Within a month of launch, the site did came in page #1 for relatively less competitive to moderate competitive keywords. I won’t be lying for the moderate keywords, I was expecting it to be 6 months to be around page 2 or page 3. Being in page number was my best case scenario. This till this date had surprised me most and I must admit it's the best result I have got.
Unlike, website #1, for my second website, which happens to be in a competitive niche, though the pages are crawled as fast as website number 1, the ranking is nowhere near what I was expecting. But, it is building up.
To conclude, I would say for less or moderate competitive keywords, with good website and content strategies, it is still possible to rank faster. But as with my main points above, it will take time and patience. In my case, I am waiting for my site to climb rankings, as I am a firm believer that if things are done right, Google will reward you. Sooner or later.