It’s called SEO, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization: it’s a little-known, albeit extremely effective, Web Marketing discipline. Obviously, the effectiveness is directly proportional to the technical knowledge and strategic approach of the professional or agency you choose to entrust your site to.
Strategies and tactics change from one sector to another and adapt to the specific guidelines of each type of business, although best practices that Google “likes” are generally similar: this makes SEO a winning mix of cross-cutting and useful activities, both for startup and SMEs for both multinational and large brands.
Here are 7 key-points suggested by Pasquale Gangemi, Pro Web Consulting’s Head of Operations, an independent SEO agency based in Switzerland, covering the majority of international markets thanks to highly specialized and experienced staff.
- Why SEO: investment and results
Why should a company invest in SEO? Some branches of Web Marketing promise more immediate and direct results, such as AdWords, or are simply more in vogue at the time, as Social and Programmatic. SEO, on the other hand, certainly has the best ROI over the medium to long term: even if with less immediacy, it brings tangible results and, once the optimization strategy is set up correctly, the website-customer’s growth becomes exponential. A word of advice on who you should choose as your SEO partner: a serious agency always monitors traffic trends and ranking of relevant keywords by providing timely reporting through specific tools and tactical fine-tuning activities;
- On-site SEO, content and trust
Optimization for search engines consists of two complementary macro-activities. First, we have on-site SEO: it is about site structure analysis and the changes or implementations needed to make it better on the SERP. The main SEO tags are very important, like Title and H1, but contents are also fundamental: a correct information architecture and text optimization, useful and informative to the user, are essential for the site to be considered trustworthy in the eyes of Google. It’s good that even the images are properly optimized, especially in those areas where the visual component is indispensable, such as fashion or design. The second macro-activity consists in increasing the site’s authority – we often rename off-site SEO to trust building: we are talking about creating resources that bring trust to the site-customer in a natural way, through product reviews/services, brand names and links;
- Internationalization
To expand your online business abroad is not enough to have a website translated into multiple languages. First, you need to decide how to structure multi-language/multi-country domains and correctly set up basic SEO tags, such as Hreflang. For content adaptation, it is good to rely on a mother-tongue translator that can capture all the peculiarities and make the difference between countries that speak the same language. All this is necessary to avoid, both in terms of ranking and UX, critical issues, traffic tampering and confusion for the user: for example, if a site dedicated to the Canadian market is poorly geo-localized, it may also be visible on the SERP in France, causing ranking, language, currency and shipment problems;
- Migrations
Are you thinking of changing website without a redirect strategy? This is not a good idea: it’s not enough to create a new portal on a new URL, by copying and pasting content into a new graphic structure. If you do so, you risk losing all the trust you have acquired over time from your previous domain, generated by both its history and backlink from other sources. To make a risk-free domain change, it’s always good to plan an ad-hoc migration strategy: it’s about setting up redirects, the precise commands that make Google understand the transition between old and new pages;
- E-commerce
Online stores possess a specific structure, made up of different elements compared to an editorial site, which is why they need a targeted strategy. The main challenges to face when ranking an e-commerce concern product page optimization and, in particular, content duplication and absence of text within the category pages;
- Industry specificity, development platforms and user-centered approach
SEO is not merely technical, on the contrary: it is a multifaceted discipline, which varies according to the strategic approach adopted, the goals to achieve and the sector to which it applies. In fact, respect for the specific guidelines of every field is fundamental: a complex industry such as fashion/luxury, for example, has stringent communication standards, such as the importance of images and visual components, which must be harmonized with the SEO best practice.
A good SEO specialist must also be able to work on optimization regardless of the development platform, whether it is WordPress, Magento or a complex structure like AngularJS.
Also, never forget that there is always the user-centered approach: monitoring keyword volumes means understanding what users are looking for and how, at specific moments of the year. A user-first strategy always gives the best results because it offers the user what they really want to find on the Net;
- Mobile
The responsive version of your site is needed, both for the consideration that search engines will have in the website (not that much time passed since the infamous Mobilegeddon) and for the benefit of users, more and more always-on on mobile. Google gives increasingly more importance to mobile devices: Gary Illyes recently announced that the Big G mobile index will soon become the primary one at the expense of the desktop index. The double index therefore forces us to reason as if desktop and mobile versions are two “different sites”.