No doubt ranking factors are some of the most influential when it comes to gaining new business opportunities but the way your website looks to the actual users or what is showing on its various pages and even what kind of research your target audiences are doing can play a significant enough role in making people stay on your website and actually become customers from casual visitors.

Imagine yourself running a business website that doesn’t really care about the four factors:

1. Attention to design
2. Audience research
3. Content
4. Attribution

Suppose you have done all the possible SEO for your website and are able to land quite a few visitors on it in a short frame of time, do you think only landing them there and not having the four factors mentioned above taken care of can actually convert them to customers, if you know the web any better than a 10 year old, we are guessing the answer will be a resounding ‘NO’. SEO is a practice that is meant to rank your website higher and not convince people to buy from you regarding whatever products or services you offer them. keeping these facts in mind, it is easy to understand that why turning ‘back to basics’ and getting the four mentioned pillars standing upright is absolutely essential before you go full out after all the important ranking factors, besides, this is exactly what and SEO expert will tell you to sort out first and will help you get all the nibbles out before they go full on SEO anyway.

1: Design – Where It All Starts

Driving all the traffic in the world to your website can all go to waste unless you have designed your website correctly in a way that your users appreciate it and want to purchase from you.

Pro Tip – Don’t consider Craiglist to be an exception, you just aren’t one of those.

In the real world aside from maybe Craiglist, people do judge the quality of your products or services from the quality of your website. You might be one of the people who might be thinking how can anyone not know this already, well ask a webmaster or an SEO expert even and they will tell you how often they come across websites that neglect this binary flaw and end up losing most of their good SEO work. You might attribute budgets to wrongly designed or lower quality websites but in fact even that is not true. The real problem lies in how people want to design and develop their websites.

Doing it all together is what usually causes problems, just like a high majority of the industry you might make the mistake of thinking you can design your own website yourself or can get it done under one roof keeping it supervised. This used to be the case but with modern innovations in website development and complex Google updates, a single developer or person can just not take everything on by themselves. Keeping design, content and development separate might be your best way to go:

1. To start it all off, you need to find yourself a great freelance designer who has taken on projects like yours in the past and is something of an expert in designing websites. Get a full brand guide and a complete website sketch from them and perfect the design yourself by suggesting any required changes at this stage.
2. Once you have a laid out design for your website and know what is going where, hire a copywriter who has a proven track record in writing for similar projects and have them craft all your content just the way you want it.
3. Lastly, you will need a WordPress developer that you can get on Codeable. Get your exact website built from them with all the content uploaded at the right places.

Not only will you have total control over the progress with this method but will also save yourself thousands of dollars when compared to hiring a team under one roof.

2: Audience Research – How Your Target Audiences Search

This should be the very first step of marketing and entails researching how exactly your specific target market behaves when it comes to buying your type of products or services. Audience research is often done even before keyword research and can play a significant role when finalizing on thing like the keywords to target or what SEO strategies can yield the best results in your specific market.

This may seem easy and simple enough but tracing the usual SEO limitation of performing keyword research but somehow neglecting SERP research much like putting a keyword or term into SEMRush or Moz but not actually doing the search yourself and identifying what actually is ranking for those terms can be the real problem. The best technique to correct this is to become one of your target audiences and search for the types of products or services you intend to sell, review what the SERP is showing and ask yourself following simple questions:

1. Will I search this if I am a stranger to this product industry?
2. What is the best way to modify my search query for it to become more relevant to my needs?
3. The sites that are ranked in the top five, do they have list of options for the buyers that we are not mentioned in?
4. Are any of these sites running Google display ads?

Question one should guide you how a general person will search for your relevant products or services. Question two should reveal the best ways to modify your queries in order to get the best search results and direct the most traffic towards your website and tailor other factors like the title tags or on-page SEO accordingly. For the third question if other sites in the top five results mention your competitors, it’s absolutely significant to reach out to their editors and advertise to show your site there as well, if not, you are missing out on a massive lead generation opportunity. The fourth question is in place only if you cannot get in contact with the editors of the top five ranking sites or could not get on their list in some way, instead you should check if there is a possibility to take out ads on the page through Google’s Display Network or natively. If you can, do this because it can be significant for your brand or website to be predominant when your target market is proceeding with the purchases.

Pro Tip – It’s not only your own website that can get you buying leads and turn visitors into actual customers.

3: Content – What is on Your Site

Every business website wants to rank for specific search terms that drive traffic towards them but another much significant factor here is if the content on your pages good enough to convince the visitors to purchase from you. You should’ve taken care of this from the start but if not, a content rewrite with possible images and short videos is in order. Your content must fall directly in line with the search terms you have optimized.

Another very important thing about content on a website or a webpage in 2018 is that, quality matters more than quantity. All the new updates point towards quality and not quantity and the last thing you need on your website is abundance of irrelevant content which actually can weigh it down rather than rank it up. The common misconception among content marketers of the past has been to place as much content as possible without focusing on the quality, quantity should still be adequately enough but with more focus on quality as well. Writing four average posts a months has less of an effect now than writing one exceptional post for the same amount of time when it comes to getting ranked higher in Google search engine. Always keep in mind that one exceptional post can be promoted much better than four average or even below average ones and has the ability to generate much better results.

Usually content marketers spend about 90% of their time producing content and only 10% time to actually promote it, there should be a healthy balance between the two and you should focus on promoting quality content as much as possible. Consider the fact that you spend a great amount of time creating some content and make it go live in the least amount of time without really promoting it and no one actually reads the post generating next to no traffic at all, ask yourself the question, did the post really go live or you just did the deed for the purpose of doing it.

4: Attribution – Getting Acknowledged

Running SEO and other campaigns all at once without being able to prove what you are doing to the executives is similar to shooting arrows in the dark with no idea of where to land them. Being marketers, you should be able to prove your worth in 2018 and even get the approval for what is being paid to you and track the progress with your campaign in place and how it was without it. If your work is not able to generate leads and actually land them, you are missing out on the best part of the deal and there is nothing to show for your work, you should always direct all your efforts towards getting successful leads and being able to show them to the executives when needed.

You should have a tool in place that can measure the success of your campaign in any direction and your efforts should be directly tied to sales, this will enable you to prove your worth and also ask for budget allocation boosts when required with confidence. With no proper tool in place doing a full one attribution of your work, you just will not be able to grow your clients to their fullest potentials and most of your efforts will go un-noticed as well. Internal software like BrightFunnel or Bizible are great options that can manage all this for you or alternatively, you can place a self-designed one when that is applicable. Some sales calculating tool will also be needed but with all these in place, you will instantly be able to spot progress in business caused by your work and identify any areas that might need more work.

The main point to take away from this writing is that if you have some of the best designs for your website in your respective industry, understand how your audiences behave during their buying journey, can come up with the most relevant persuading content and can attribute all your efforts to successful business growth, you will have a good time in 2018. If you need help with any of these basics or feel that you have gotten these sorted, it’s time to discuss your ranking factors with an expert like The SEO Company UAE. Contact us via our website, www.seo.ae and we will guide you to all that needs to be changed and will set you on your merry top ranking ways boosting your business manifolds.