Improving Search Engine Visibility

Writing by Nick Stamoulis in SEO

Increase search engine visibility for branded keywords:

It’s important that you get your search engine visibility for branded keywords at as close to 100% of the top ten results as possible. After all, this is your brand we are talking about! You want to control/own as much of the content that ranks for branded keywords as possible. Every time someone searches for your brand and doesn’t eventually find their way to your site that is a missed opportunity.

1. Claim all local business profiles.
There are dozens of local business profile sites that can help with your SEO and increase your search engine visibility. In my opinion, the most important are Google Local/Places for Business and Bing Local, with Yahoo Local in a close third. But there are dozens of smaller local business sites like MerchantCircle, Yelp, Local.com, YP.com and more—each one of these local profiles can rank in the search engines for your brand and help you dominate the SERPs for branded keywords. You never know which profile a potential visitor might find themselves on, so it’s important that each profile be as complete as possible and lists all your contact information.

2. Optimize your social networking profiles.
Even though you don’t really “own” your social profiles, your company Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ pages can rank in the search engines right alongside your company website and corporate blog, helping increase your search engine visibility. Again, when someone is searching for your company by name you want to make sure they land on a page that is ultimately going to lead them back to your website. A company social profile is a good way to introduce your company to a new potential customer and start building a relationship.

Increase search engine visibility for non-branded keywords:

The end goal of SEO is really to increase search engine visibility for non-branded keywords. Most of the time, a visitor that arrives on your site via non-branded keyword has never interacted with your brand before, so this is the perfect opportunity to turn that person into a new customer.

1. Optimize company blog posts for non-branded keywords.
It’s important to remember that the search engines rank individual pages in the SERPs, not websites as whole. Just like individual products or service pages can rank in the search engine for non-branded keywords, so too can individual blog posts. Each blog post can be optimized for a different long tail keyword, helping increase your search engine visibility for a whole new slew of keywords. Blog posts are also a great place to target your “priority” keywords that might be a little more broad and competitive and need a lot of attention over time in order to be successful.

2. Create great off-site content.
A great SEO program doesn’t just involve creating good onsite content, it also means creating great offsite content as well. Webinars, white papers, guest blogs and articles, infographics and more—all of these pieces of content (published on other sites) are a great way to drive non-branded traffic back over to your site. What’s even better, those pieces of offsite content act like a lead qualifier for your conversion funnel!