One of the most challenging lessons for any new online business owner to learn is the fact that people won’t flock to your website and start beating the doors down simply because you’ve announced that you’re ready to do business. Before you can start making sales, people have to know that you exist – and that’s not easy to do, given the fact that there’s no such thing as an industry with no competition.
No matter what industry you’re in, there are plenty of other businesses with significant head starts over you. The trick, then, is to figure out how to get web traffic. Google’s search engine will always be your most important source of traffic because showing up on Google’s search results pages means that you have a chance to get a visitor – and potentially earn a new customer – for free. Getting there, however, definitely is not free. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of systematically improving your presence on Google to maximize your chance of earning free traffic.
Handling your own SEO as a business owner isn’t impossible, but it is tough. How are you going to find the time to devise a content strategy, create the content, analyze your website for technical shortcomings and execute marketing initiatives when you’re already busy sourcing products, interacting with customers, and packing orders?
If you try to do it all yourself, you’re going to fall short somewhere. Most business owners, therefore, need to utilize outside help when it comes to SEO. There are two ways to utilize outside help for SEO. The first way is to hire an agency and let them do the planning and execution for you.
The benefit of hiring an agency is that you may not know precisely what your website needs and an agency can figure that out for you. Using an agency, however, has two drawbacks. The first is that SEO agencies can be costly.
The second drawback is that, apart from the luxury of having someone plan the campaign for you, you probably won’t get more for your money because most SEO agencies outsource their work to freelancers.
The other way of utilizing outside help for SEO is by doing the planning yourself and finding your own freelancers. Planning your own SEO requires a little more effort upfront, but it’s still a time saver in the long run because you’re not the one doing the work.
You’ll also get a lot more job done for your money because you’ll be going straight to the providers of that work rather than through an intermediary. That decision alone will dramatically improve the ROI of your SEO efforts.
So, what specific tasks should you hire freelancers to perform? The goal is to select the jobs likely to bring the most significant returns for your investment, and we have a few ideas to get you started. These ideas have the best chance of bringing you high returns because once they’re done, they belong to you permanently and can continue attracting traffic to your website forever.
When you sell products online, your potential customers aren’t just the people in your home country; you can potentially sell to anyone in the world – and while English is the universal language of business, many consumers would prefer to shop on their own languages.
You can use a software-based translation package to translate your site to other languages, of course, but that technique tends to bring poor results because software-translated text often doesn’t make much sense to the reader.
It’s much better to hire someone bilingual to handle the translation for you. Companies like Premium Vape have used this technique to significant effect by creating localized versions of their websites for regions in which English isn’t the primary language.
Hands down, the best thing that you can do for your website’s SEO is to start a blog and begin publishing high-quality informational content. Blogging is the best way to market your business for several reasons. The first of those is that the ROI can be astronomical.
A blog post that ranks well on Google and receives a high volume of search traffic can bring thousands of visitors to your site over the course of several years. The second reason why blogging works so well is that the searches that you should generally be targeting are informational – not commercial – in nature.
Informational keywords have less competition on Google, which means that you have an excellent chance to generate traffic through your blog posts even if your commercial content and product pages aren’t yet bringing in visitors.
If you’re fortunate enough to find a freelance writer who understands your industry, you can leave the blogging to him or her. If not, though, here are some tips for operating a useful blog when someone else is doing the writing.
The absolute worst thing that you can do when you’re running an e-commerce website uses the manufacturer-supplied descriptions for products or copy your product descriptions from competing sellers. If you’re already using copied product descriptions, there’s an easy way to see why that’s such a bad idea. Copy a sentence from one of the descriptions on your site and paste it, in quotation marks, into Google.
You’ll see hundreds – possibly thousands – of pages with the exact same text. If your product page brings nothing unique to the table that Google doesn’t already have in its index hundreds of times, that page will never receive any organic traffic. If you’re using copied product descriptions, one of the most useful things for you to have a freelancer do is write original descriptions for you.
The longer and more helpful those descriptions are, the more likely your product pages will be to receive organic traffic – but even a short original description is better than a long copied one. It’s better to have a small chance of receiving traffic than no chance at all.
If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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