Despite what many Singapore business owners think, SEO is not just keywords. It requires several elements to create an effective and holistic marketing strategy that can get results. Not only that, but Singapore marketers must be aware of the most effective SEO techniques. Let’s take a look at a few things that all business owners should keep in mind.
1. Industry and Competition
When it comes to creating the perfect SEO strategy, you need to first consider the type of industry you’re in as well as the competition that you’re up against. Who are your competitors and where do they do business? What strategies are your competitors using? What brand is your biggest competition? These questions will help you to determine your next move.
2. Keyword Research
As you learn more about your industry and your target audience, you need to find out what your potential customers are searching for. And this can be done by performing keyword research. Not only should you know what users are searching for, but it’s also important to think about how they’re searching for things.
3. User Intent
Another important factor in SEO is user intent. You need to know why a user searches for the terms they do. What goals are behind their search? You see, each variation of a keyword or keyword phrases can reflect an entirely different goal. The more you know about intent, the more clicks, and conversion you can achieve. Also, by studying user behaviour and intent, you can target keywords that you would not have otherwise considered.
4. Analytics and Reporting
Any digital marketing campaign requires the use of analytics and reporting. And this is because it helps you to discover which tactics are rendering the best results. In this way, you can duplicate your strategies in other campaigns. It will also help you to discover strategies that are not so effective so that you can make the necessary tweaks and changes.
Analytics and reporting also clue you into which of your keywords and landing pages are performing the best. In some cases, your industry may simply be experiencing changes which means that you need a new approach. Analytics and reporting will let you know when it’s time to change your keywords and landing pages to suit these particular trends.
5. Mobile SEO
One of the most recent and game-changing updates Google has made is it’s mobile first indexing. Google is now using the mobile version of your website to determine the ranking of your entire site. And this is a dramatic shift considering that it once focused primarily on the desktop version. Sure, the desktop version of your site still matters, but Singapore businesses should give priority to mobile.
So work according to best practices. Make sure that your website features a responsive and mobile-friendly design. The more seamless your mobile experience is, the more opportunities you create for your business in the search engines.
6. Crawling
The search engine bots crawl your website in order to learn more about the information that you offer so that it knows how and where to index your site in the search results. This is why it’s so important that your website is properly structured and that your internal linking is on point. It’s also ideal to have a sitemap. These things make it easier for the search engines to crawl.
Technical errors like 404 pages can really stand in the way of the search engine bots. This is especially the case when it comes to having a Disallow:/ in your robots.txt. This command tells the bots not to crawl your website. So make sure that you work with a professional SEO agency so that they can audit your site and ensure that these types of problems don’t exist
7. Indexing
While indexing and crawling may be similar, they both serve two different purposes. When Singapore business owners use the noindex, nofollow ineffectively it has a huge impact on the success of their website. In fact, it can be just as harmful as not including a sitemap. Another issue appears when you canonicalise your pages, but fail to identify your trailing slash problems. This can result in indexing triple the number of pages that your website has and this disrupts Google’s ranking algorithms.
Failing to properly index your website, the crawlers can miss out on entire sections of it. And this will dramatically affect your rankings. This is another reason why getting a website audit is so important. It can cut these issues off before they even start.
8. Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to elements such as coding, site speed, Schema JSON-LD, JavaScript, Schema markup, and canonicalisation. When these and other elements like it or not done properly, it can have a negative impact on your ranking. For example, if you’ve created the perfect website, but have missed a detail in your cannonicalisation plug-in, this can lead to a host of problems. This is especially the case if your site is large because it’s more complex.
9. Content
No matter what industry your Singapore business is in, content will always be one of the cornerstones of a great SEO strategy. Good content can increase your rankings and send more traffic to your site. However, if the content is not well-written then it can do just the opposite. We often see this in cases where content comes across as spammy. When it lacks readability or contains a disproportionate amount of keywords, it can result in a loss of authority.
The key to ensuring that your content is of high quality is to write things that resonate with your audience. It should include relevant keywords and deliver on its initial promise. Make sure that your copy is free of grammatical errors and that you optimise your meta description and images.
10. Links
Links can also play a huge role in the success of your SEO strategy. When deciding on your ranking, Google takes a good look at your link profile. It’s important to remember that not all links are created equally. In other words, not all links are good links. Your backlinks should come from relevant websites that have a lot of authority. Not only that, but they should come from a variety of different places.
11. Optimize your Profile
If you already have a profile on Google My Business, spend some time making sure that every detail in it is correct to avert mislead potential customers. Below are four things that you need to do to optimize your profile and give it professional look.
- Check if all your business information is up-to-date
- Choose specific categories, for example, instead of using a general term such as “grocery store,” consider using “fresh organic grocery store.”
- Replace low-quality images with professional ones
- Encourage satisfied customers to leave a review after doing business with you
12. Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the resources that will help take your digital marketing efforts in Singapore to the next level. Concisely, this is a free service offered by Google to help webmasters and online marketers keep track and maintain their site presence on Google search engine results page. The analytical data that it provides will give you insights on what you should do to optimize your site.
Finally, site page load speed is one of the primary factors that customers use to determine if they will do business with a particular website. Note that even a one-second delay in page load time can hurt your business. Pingdom’s Website Speed Test is one of the tools that you can use to know the amount of time that every page on your site takes to load fully.
Take Action
No matter how great your SEO strategy is, if you don’t put it into action, it’s just that–a plan. Don’t stop at creating a beautiful website. You need to look deeper into what goes on behind the scenes of that site. How can you make sure that it is full optimised and gets the attention rankings that it deserves?
Conclusion
As you can see, there’s more to SEO than just keywords. The key is to pay attention to the needs of your target audience as well as Google’s best practices recommendation. With a little research, time, and diligence, you can ensure that your SEO plan gives your Singapore website the boost it needs.
