Many business owners in Nigeria think that so long as they have a website, customers would automatically come pouring into their office. They believe that SEO for business owners is a myth. Are you one of them?
Do you think that merely having a ‘basic’ website, which in most cases is nothing more than an online brochure, will lead to new customers patronising your product or service?
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Having a website is just a small piece of your overall marketing puzzle. For your site to be useful, other parts of the puzzle in the form of search engine optimisation, pay per click advertisements, search engine marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and so on, all need to be present.
For this article, I will focus on search engine optimisation (SEO). I’ll leave the other topics for another day and another post.
What Are the Necessary SEO Activities?
The necessary SEO activities are on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO involves the actual regular fine-tuning of your website’s code and other elements on the site itself for proper crawling, indexing and ranking by the search engines.
Ensure that your on-page optimisation has been performed correctly as per each Search engine’s optimisation rules.
On-page S.E.O is a crucial part of Search engine optimisation, and it’ll help your site to remain ranked in your company topics and keywords in leading search engines for a long time.
Be clear on the issues you will focus on in your content. Place your keywords correctly in Meta tags and do some research work to know the latest trend going on.
If you have the flare for techie stuff, you may do any of these on-page optimisations by yourself in your starting stage without spending your money on SEO.
If you don’t have the flare for writing and creating content, then you might have to employ someone in-house or outsource your content writing and content creation to digital agencies like Mauco Enterprises.
Regarding your on-page SEO, you need to pay attention to:
Website Indexing
Ensure that search engines correctly index all the pages of your website. If they do not index your site, people searching for your product or service on Google or Bing will not see your website listed. This situation can be detrimental to growing your business online.
Meta Robots ‘NO INDEX’
This meta tag is a unique tag that you need to use with caution. Although it has its benefits when applied well if you’re not an expert, you better not to mess with it.
What does it do? The no index tag when applied to your web page or entire website will instruct search engine bots and spiders that crawl your page not to index it.
This tag is mostly used to hide specific pages from search engines you don’t want the public to see. It’s also used by web developers to protect websites under construction or maintenance from search engines until the web developer is ready to launch the site to the public.
Site Speed
You need to ensure that your website is super fast. The speed of your website when loading is an essential factor that Google’s algorithm uses in ranking your site.
Ideally, pages on your website should load in three seconds! This figure is the benchmark recommended by Google. However, in reality, the most well-optimised webpage will load under eight seconds.
The longer your webpage takes to load, the higher the chances that your website visitors and potential customers will abandon your site. No one has time for a slow-loading webpage. Gone are the days of the ‘worldwide wait’.
Robots.txt File
As its name suggests, a Robots.txt file is a file in the root folder of your website. This file provides instructions to search engine bots and crawlers visiting your site what it permits them to do or not.
It’s best to leave this file alone for your web developer to handle rather than poking into it yourself, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
URL Canonicalisation
Ever noticed that sometimes they write a URL, for example as “www.mauconline.net” or “mauconline.net”, well technically you need to choose one of the above and stick to it.
Otherwise, you will send the wrong signals to search engines as they will not know which version should get indexed and ranked, which will ultimately be detrimental to your website.
Which one is better, that is merely a matter of preference. I prefer to go without the www.
Optimise Your Website for Mobile
Mobile and smartphone are today’s requirement for every individual to cope-up with the marketplace.
While constructing your site, keep this in mind. Always try to optimise based on choices and views.
Sites, specially designed for mobile screen performance, are simple to get for search engine crawlers, and you might have some additional benefits to remain ahead in position.
Sitemap Creation
There are various websites you can find together with less traffic flow just because of the sitemap. This reduced traffic is why XML Sitemap is a vital factor for any site to get ranked.
Content Creation
Content would be king in the digital online marketing world. You need to create excellent shareable content in various formats such as blog posts, infographics, slide presentations, videos, and so on.
Choose your company keyword first and juggle those keywords on your website body content obviously to get ranked on these keywords.
Remember, don’t insert your primary keywords forcefully on your content. You may get penalised by Google.
You may create a blog connected with your site to update your content regularly.
Off-page SEO
Involves everything else that takes place off-site that goes into promoting your website and its content to be highly ranked in search engine result pages (SERP’s).
Off-page SEO includes but is not limited to backlinks, social shares, mentions, earned paid media, and so on.
Influencer Outreach
Search for influencers in your niche who can help you promote your content, products, and services to their loyal followers.
Contribute as Guest Author
Seek out opportunities to contribute articles to relevant blogs in your industry. Don’t guest posts to gain links.
Instead, see it as an opportunity to attract a new audience of potential customers to your brand. The links you get are secondary.
See to add value to your audience when they consume your content.
Social Media Engagement
Cultivate and grow an online following for your brand on relevant social networks where your target audience hangs out.
Concerning social media, you need to be present, be human and be proactive with your fans and followers.
The more your brand engages in social media, the better your chances of building a loyal following.
Local Promotion
Continuously focus on promoting your site in the local market. By choosing local keywords, you may get some fast and straightforward ranking to enhance your company reach into the local market.
The primary benefit is you need not spend a ton of cash for targeting a local audience as you would if you were aiming for a global audience, for instance.
Forums, Directories, Bookmarking and Sharing
Get your website listed in the relevant industry and niche directories appropriate for your off-page SEO.
Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and so on are also suitable.
Which Is Better On-page or Off-page SEO?
For best result, you need both on-page and off-page SEO. It’s not a choice of doing one or the other. Do both.
I don’t expect the average business owner to be passionate about all these techie stuff. Therefore, there’s nothing wrong if at this stage you are thinking of getting someone or an SEO agency to handle all these SEO stuff on your behalf, right?
To get started, read this article on “How to Select an Awesome SEO Agency That’s Right for Your Brand” to help you out so you don’t fall into the wrong hands.
Also, when selecting an SEO specialist or an SEO agency to partner with, make sure they explain SEO to you in simple and clear terms that you can understand and avoid all the techie SEO jargon.
Ensure that the agency you select will assist you in incorporating these ten tips for an effective SEO strategy.
Avoid any so-called SEO specialist or agency that tries to sell you on any of these old SEO myths. Don’t fall for it.
Closing Thoughts on SEO for Business Owners
As a business owner in the harsh Nigerian environment, you already have loads of things to contend with, and SEO might not be your passion.
If you find all these stuff annoying or too technical, I understand. Your best option is to outsource your SEO to Mauco Enterprises.
We provide SEO services for business owners in Nigeria, and we have the experience and tools required.
Contact SEO experts in Nigeria now and let us explore the possibility of partnering with you to help you gain the most of SEO for your business in Nigeria.
Related Article(s)
- Is Content Marketing Becoming the New SEO?
- What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
- How to Select an Awesome SEO Agency That’s Right for Your Brand
- 10 Reliable Tips for an Effective SEO Strategy This Year
- How to Be an SEO Expert
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