These could be a few questions that must be hovering in your mind. which may be the very reason you have landed on this blog. Your search ends here…as with this article we will help you understand what is SEO and how it can help small businesses like yours.

Search Engine Optimization is educating search engines to know the existence of your website and its contents. Once a search engine records your website’s existence and its contents, all the details are stored in their unique database. So whenever your customers search for any service that you provide, the system searches in the database and displays the search results.
This happens in a fraction of seconds as you can see in the screenshot.

There are close to 1.74 billion websites across the world. Every website has content on it. And search engines typically crawl only those websites which are recorded in its database.

When it comes to search engine optimization, most of the focus is only on Google Search Engine as it dominates the search traffic. There are other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL, Naver, Yandex, Baidu, Ecosia, Sogou, and Shenma etc, whose market share is represented below. It which clearly shows that Google is not just the most used, but it dominates the search.

Google became the king of search engines, as it keeps itself updated with people and their search behavior. Hence it is very essential to keep your website updated as per Google search engine needs.

Why is SEO important?

Well, we come across this question from most of our prospects who are just entering the digital world and launching their first website. And here is the answer.

SEO not only helps you to rank on Google but helps you create global visibility, improves sales and builds trust. When your customers find you on Google, they are highly likely to reach you for your products and services. Hence SEO becomes the most important step right after you have your website on the internet.

What is SERP in SEO?

There are a humongous number of websites on the internet, waiting to be displayed in the search results. Search engines need a measure based on which they decide which websites should be displayed first. And there should be a reason or a measure of why a website is displayed first. That is where Google introduced the concept of Search Engine Result Pages on its search engine. SERP basically indicates the position of a website in Google’s search results.

Here are a few things you must know to rank your website on Google:

STEP 1: Keep Google educated about your products and services through your website.

“How do I keep my website updated every time, so Google knows it?”

This is a general question that we at KloudPortal answer for most of our clients.

Developing a website, doesn’t mean Google will know that the website exists. Many of our customers initially thought this was the case. We at Kloudportal educated them that there are a set of tasks that are to be done, which invite the Google bots to crawl the pages of the website and record their existence. Typically these tasks come under On-Page SEO.

What is On-Page SEO?

For a website to be crawled by the Google search engine bots, the website should follow a few basic guidelines. Here are the top 10 guidelines to be followed:

• A website should have unique content
• Optimize the speed of the website. Make sure it loads in less than 3 seconds. Make sure to work with a reliable server provider like OVH, Bigrock, Hostgator etc., to ensure your website is never facing any downtime.
• Ensure the website has accelerated mobile pages. This is a recent parameter that was introduced by Google.
• Add content regularly to your website. Update blogs every week and add valuable content for your subscribers and website visitors.
• Update your sitemap.xml
• Canonicalization of URLs
• Javascript Minifications
• Robots.txt file update
• Keywords, Meta Titles and Descriptions on each of the pages
• Image optimization

There are close to 25 steps other than the top ten stated above, for on-page SEO to be completed. Setting up your on-page SEO helps Google in indexing your website pages. However, this alone isn’t sufficient to rank your website on Google.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is the best place to get a picture of how your website is performing.

You have completed step 1? Searched yourself on Google with the keywords? And your website doesn’t show up? Wondering why it still doesn’t show up? You are too early assessing the power of search engine, my friend.

Here is the next step:

STEP 2: Educate Google by putting your website in other visible places.

Didn’t get it?
Never mind!
Marketing is all about telling the World “I exist”.
It is not at one place that you should say you exist, but it should be at different places as well.
For example, if I own a store and I keep hoarding in front of my store, that itself isn’t enough to drive the people to come to my store. My store should be visible to my prospects and customers where they are searching and also where they may not be searching. So pamphlets, hoardings etc., play an important role. The same applies to digital marketing and SEO.

So the technique of educating Google about your existence through various other places is called Off-Page SEO.

What do we do in off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is all about submissions, backlinks and driving traffic to your website. How do we do that?
Here are a few technical steps we follow:

• Identify the right keywords for your website.
  We do this with the help of Google Keyword Planner tool or Uber Suggest.
• Identify the right bookmarking sites.
• Submit our websites in
  Classified websites,
  Directory submissions,
  Create PPTs, White Papers etc., and submit them regularly.

Another important step to generating backlinks is through content marketing. I shall be covering that in the next step in detail.

SEO is all about consistency, persistence and quality.

“How long does it take to have my website visible on Google Search Results?”
This is another question that we hear from our customers. And trust me there is no single answer for this question. It depends on many factors. However the key is to be consistently producing the content and keep submitting to the authority websites.

Step 3: Content marketing

Content writing is the key to content marketing. Writing the right content that your customer could be searching for, is always a challenge. We at KloudPortal mostly work with doctors and healthcare professionals for their digital marketing needs. After thorough research and analyzing the SERPs we understood that a search on Google uses the very basic terms and not the medical jargon. Doctors were amazed by the results when we showed them how the customers were searching for their services.

Presenting the content in the most readable and understandable manner is important to produce effective content. Here are a few best practices for effective content writing:

• Keep the sentences short, simple and meaningful.
• Adopt a conversational style rather than an informational style of writing.
• Back your content with the right statistics.
• Make your content Voice SEO friendly.
• Make sure to add relevant keywords and have them in the right proportions. Over-optimization with keywords is not a good practice.
• Most importantly, don’t forget that your E-mail is also a content marketing tool.
  Content not always needs to be text or Images, videos also play a vital role in marketing nowadays. Video marketing, especially self-made videos, is gaining traction.

Step 4: Social media marketing:

Social media is a marketing messiah. The way social media attracts and glues up the audience, itself makes it great leverage for businesses. While Facebook, Instagram and Youtube engage the masses, professional networks like LinkedIn and Opportunity have more B2B audiences.

While Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, Pinterest give a platform for social engagement of the audience, we cannot forget the discussion platforms like Quora, which engages few more..

We at KloudPortal suggest our clients with the appropriate Social Media Channels for their Digital Marketing engagements. We sincerely believe in narrowing down the target audience and then suggest the marketing plan. We follow a structured process and a strategic approach. Most of our marketing plans are equipped with mitigation steps. This keeps the risk under the client’s control and ensures effective spend on marketing activities.

STEP 5: Press releases

Occasional Press Releases about your latest activities help drive traffic to your website. Typically press releases every 6 months will not only help in building the traffic to the website but also get you the necessary backlinks you may need to build the domain authority for your website. Domain authority is one of the key ranking parameters in SEO.
Press Releases could be for the company or for your CEO, who can build a brand and drive traffic to the websites.

When it comes to PR, we consider the strategic placement of resources out there, so maximum leverage can be applied. Our Digital personal PR plans, Corporate marketing strategies and brand building activities have helped businesses to gain very good visibility in the market.

If you would like to know more about us and our services, please don’t hesitate to fill the form. We shall be glad to get in touch with you!

Would you be surprised to know that written content did not lose its importance even in the present age of the internet?  Despite the technological advancements, it is through your words that you convey information, and that is also the reason you are going through this blog!  Content writing is one of the most effective SEO services to drive traffic to your website and boost online sales.

How to create attractive content?

Bring to me a children’s fairy tale book with colorful illustrations, and a plain textbook with hi-fi technical terms.  My choice is the first book with fairy tales.  What makes it attractive is the simple language, clear presentation, and colorful pictures used.  If you present content in a similar fashion on your e-commerce website, would it not draw people’s attention?  It is how professional content writing services draw traffic to your website.

Good content should be:

• Clear
• Simple in language
• Backed by pictures
• Conversational tone

• Guide the customer:

Content writing should be informative, to educate people regarding how to choose a product that is best for them.  For instance, you run a business of electronic gadgets.  A customer who is purchasing an air conditioner for the first time may not be able to decide between a 1 ton and 1.5 ton air conditioner.  You may include a guide box on your website asking to enter the approximate dimensions of the room.  Based on the input received, you may suggest the best air conditioner options from your business.

• Target the customer’s needs and emotions

Focus more on the customer’s needs than the features your products offer.  For instance, let us say you run a business of flowers and bouquets.  Special days like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc. are your peak business days.  You presented an ad like this:

“Here we present a combo offer.  We offer a bouquet of yellow roses with chocolates for your mother with your personalized message on Mother’s Day.”

Instead, how about an ad like this?

“It’s Mother’s Day again! Remind your mother how special she is to you, with this beautiful bunch of yellow roses and a box of chocolates, along with a personalized message that conveys your love.”

I would choose the product that offers the second description, as I find it emotionally appealing.

Content marketing should focus more on the customer’s needs than a description of your services.  This drives in more sales.

• Include podcasts and video content:

More than 50% of people who watch podcasts are convinced to purchase the product.  Videos and podcasts have a visual effect on people’s minds.  They help in attracting the section of the audience which is not tuned to reading text.  It is another powerful way of presenting content and also helps greatly in search engine optimization.

Hand over the job to professional content writing services

Hope that now you got an idea of how to make the content better.  Then, why wait to act on it?!  Give your e-commerce website a new lease of life with fresh content.  Hand over the job of content writing to agencies experienced in these services, while you sit back and celebrate the increasing traffic of your website.  Write to us at contactus@kloudportal.com for details.