Best SEO Practices for Driving Business in 2024

“Enhance your digital presence with expert SEO strategies.” - Integrative media solutions.

Introduction:

Whether you’re starting a new business or have been in the grind for a while, getting organic traffic flowing to your website is one of the main keys to success. With new brands and businesses emerging day after day, it’s crucial to focus on your marketing strategy and SEO practices to increase visibility, build credibility and trust amongst consumers, and grow your overall user experience. So, what is the best way to achieve this in 2024? Here are some of the best SEO practices to follow.

What is SEO?

Before we dive deeper into the SEO world, it’s important to explain what these letters even stand for. SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is a combination of practices and processes that help drive organic traffic to your website from a variety of search engines. The goal is to increase traffic, and with it, engagement and conversions, to your business without using any paid resources. 

Typically, the most important search engine everyone thinks of when talking about SEO is Google, but this tool is extremely important across variety of digital spaces: from social media to cross-linking with other websites. It’s complex, multi-disciplinary, and very dynamic. But it’s one of the most important aspects of a successful marketing strategy, especially in 2024. 

Key Elements of SEO

In order to create a successful SEO strategy, it’s important to focus on a variety of key elements. Starting with the right target audience for your business to reach the right customers and picking out the best and most competitive keywords, to creating SEO-friendly content, both on and off-site. Here’s a good cheat sheet to explain each key element in its entirety:

Hare are 7 compelling reasons to kickstart your website's SEO today!

Before embarking on the SEO journey, the most important step in your marketing strategy is to define your ideal customer. This is the type of individual you’re trying to win over and have them fall in love with your business. Since you know your business the best, you know exactly who you’re creating for. Whether you offer services or sell products, you’ve most likely had your perfect customer in mind when you started, and that’s who you want to reach with your SEO strategy. 

Understanding and defining your product or service to the fullest, together with all of its features, potentials, and benefits, will help you identify who might benefit from it the most. This is how you’ll be able to define your target demographic, age group, geographical location, their interests, and more. And if you already have customers, it’s important to analyze that same data and dive deep into their purchase behavior. As you grow, you’ll be able to tweak and make changes where necessary, fine tuning your SEO practices to reach the right people for your business.  

Probably the most important part of your SEO will be keywords. Through keyword research, you’ll be able to identify the most valuable and relatable keywords for your business that your target audience will be using to search for services or products. For example, if your business sells activewear, your potential customers will most likely search for terms such as “workout clothes”, “leggings”, “sports bra”, and “gym clothes”.

Your next step will then be to develop a plan to use those valuable keywords and implement them effectively with your website content, matching images, vides, and graphics, as well as blog posts and other eye-capturing visuals. You’ll also use these keywords in your paid media, optimizing your reach even without the organic component. 

Defining keywords is extremely important, but they mean little without quality content that will attract your ideal customers and keep the ones you have coming back. Optimizing your content by strategically placing keywords in titles, headers, meta descriptions, and throughout the text on your pages will be key in bringing your business in front of many others within your industry. 

Your content also needs to be engaging, high-quality, straightforward, and relevant to what your business is offering so that it can help answer questions and address needs of those clicking on your website. Through content, you’ll be able to tell a story, capture the audience of many, and sell your services or products in a successful manner. 

In addition to text and images, it’s also important to use video content. It’s dynamic, easier to digest, and helps showcase your business in a better way. In fact, 91% of businesses use video as a tool to elevate their business, and 88% of them see it as an important marketing strategy in 2024. 

Most online searches are done through mobile phones nowadays, making mobile-friendly websites crucial for the success of your business. Whether you’re operating through a website or even have a downloadable app, you should expect that most consumers will search, buy, and book services through their phones. 

Ensure your website is readable, responsive, fast, and intuitive, making the user experience pleasant. Additionally, make the contact, buy, or book buttons stand out, so that the customers can easily navigate, click, and perform actions on your site, making it more likely to yield success. 

Keywords and high-quality content are the base of your SEO practice. However, they need to be performed just as well on the backend as they are on the front. Improving your site speed, making sure there are no broken links, removing all duplicate content, optimizing each image and video to the right size so it can easily be loaded, and cleaning up all unnecessary text are crucial for your SEO success. This is why performing regular technical audits is an essential part of your SEO strategy, constantly optimizing and increasing your SEO ranking. 

In addition to on-page SEO through content and clean URLs, your site will increase its ranking by gaining high-quality backlinks from reputable sources in the industry. This will improve your credibility and help bring more relevant customers to your site.

Another important off-page SEO for 2024 is social media. Having an engaging social media presence, through whichever social media platform makes sense for your business, is a great way to drive traffic to your site and reach your target audience from multiple angles. 

And lastly, online reviews are a great way to reach new customers. Even though having reviews on your site is important, getting positive feedback on other sites that link to your site is even greater - helping boost your sales and drive traffic. 

If your business is focusing on local customers, spend some time optimizing your content for local search. This means creating and keeping your Google Business Profile up-to-date, incorporating location-based keywords, and staying connected with the local community. Here is another example where testimonials and reviews bring a lot of attention, helping bring in more customers to your front door.