Why SEO is Important for Personal Brand Entrepreneurs
How many brands are operating in the United States? This is a seemingly simple question on the surface but is very complicated underneath. Any company in the US can have its own brand. A brand is not necessarily a flashy logo and a trademark. Any business operates as a brand through its customers’ expectations and experience. A flower shop with one landline and a Spectrum internet connection can be a brand. There are more than 5.6 million businesses operating in the US. There are hundreds of other foreign brands that also target the U.S market. Long story short, the business world in the 21st century is a cutthroat arena.
Where is SEO important for brand entrepreneurs?
If you’re an entrepreneur reading this, you probably don’t directly work on SEO for your brand/business. SEO is a constantly evolving field, especially in today’s digital landscape. In layman terms, SEO techniques 2020 to improve your search engine rankings. The purpose is to direct more organic traffic on your brand’s website. SEO involves a lot of technical skill, which is why most entrepreneurs either hire professionals or outsource it.
But just because SEO is technical doesn’t mean you can’t understand it. An understanding of SEO means you can better observe how your brand is doing it. This blog explores why SEO is important for brand entrepreneurs. We will look at various aspects of SEO and how they are important, including:
- Keywords
- Onsite SEO
- Offsite SEO
- URLs
- Page Loading Times
Let’s dive right into them.
Keywords
Keywords are a cornerstone of SEO strategy. You need to choose the right keywords if you want your SEO efforts to succeed. The first step in that is research. This does not necessarily mean you have to spend days on it. But you do need to know what you want your brand to be known for. Think about the phrases and words you want Google to show your website as a result for. Look into long tail keywords, industry-specific keywords, and common search terms to start building a keyword list.
Onsite SEO
Okay so you know what keywords you want and you have discussed them with your SEO team. The next step is to make sure these words are in place correctly on your website. A few key areas you need to look at in terms of keywords are:
- The page titles
- The page URL
- The content
- The meta description
- Keywords sections
As a general rule, you need these keywords to appear organically on your website.
Offsite SEO
You have probably come across the term backlinking in your research on SEO. Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO and is usually concerned with offsite efforts. You need to have your SEO people to reach out and start building valuable links with other websites. Generally, higher-ranking website links tend to raise your ranking as well. You need to share content with other websites that contain links back to your:
- Homepage
- Social media profiles
- Blogs/articles
- Landing pages
Link building is a significant factor in Google’s search engine rankings. The more links you have, and the better their quality, the higher your ranking will go. So ask your SEO team to really work on building valuable links for your website.
URLs
You may not know this, but optimizing URLs is also an important part of SEO. You need to keep your URLs as readable as possible. The readability, in this case, concerns humans, not bots. Make them simple and readable. Avoid using unfamiliar symbols like underscores instead of hyphens. Use lower case letters always, because URLs are case sensitive and you don’t want to send prospects onto the wrong page.
Page Loading Times
Statistics tell us the longer a page takes to load, the higher its bounce rate. “Bounce rate” is a term that means visitors come on to your site and leave almost immediately. A high bounce rate means people are not getting what they clicked on your page for. Page loading times are a huge contributor to bounce rates. Generally, a website should not have a loading time exceeding 3 seconds. Any longer and you run the risk of losing visitors. This means you need to get your SEO team to work on improving your website loading times. They should remove elements that are not essential to your website. The focus should be on both mobile and web browser-loading speeds. Your mobile responsive version should load just as fast as your web browser version. A faster website generally means more conversions than a clunky, slow-loading website.
So now you have more than just an inkling of SEO. As a brand entrepreneur, you will appreciate how you can now keep a more keen eye on your SEO efforts. You can see SEO is important to the success of your brand. You can also see why you should know more about it. It doesn’t matter if you’re operating a small boutique or a retailer site for Spectrum bundles, SEO is equally important. Start investing in it now and reap the long-term rewards in the future.
