Many entrepreneurs and business owners who have, or are, in the process of transitioning to digital commerce often complain about their unsatisfactory experience as an online seller.

For an online business, having a robust digital footprint is extremely important. Brands that neglect on building their online presence not only lose the competition but also their worth.

A strong digital footprint plays a deciding role in the ultimate success of the business. It determines how the brand is perceived by its customers, its credibility in the market, and how it can grow in the future.

However, in order to make your brand’s online presence vibrant and long-lasting, you must introduce certain Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to improve your rankings, enhance usability and build trust.

In this article, we will share 7 SEO practices that you can do to build a digital footprint to be reckoned with.

#1. Keep Your Website Supplied with Blogs

Creating a blog is undoubtedly one of the fastest and the most effective methods to build, strengthen and grow your digital footprint. You can start searching for trending topics and creating blog ideas that support relevant, informative and valuable content to supply your readers.

With Google’s latest ranking standards, long-form content is preferable as it provides you plenty of space to talk about your topic and gives the extra edge you need to rank against competitors. Try to take it at least 1,000 words with lively visual content that keeps the user engaged.

Once you improve the quality of your blog content with in-depth articles you can increase the interest of your target audience and increase boost SEO of your blogs.

#2. Increase More Links in Your Website

Moreover, your digital marketing strategy significantly depends on the number of links you introduce into your blog and on-page content. With a mix of both on-site and off-site linking practices, you can sway the rankings on search engines such as Google through consistency and strategy.

Using a bit of both can easily get you the link juice essential for scoring on Google and staying ahead of your competition. This also optimizes your website’s crawlability for search engines and introduces your content through local as well as international niches.

On-page SEO internal linking provides cohesion within the website, gives better navigation and improves the user experience from several aspects. External linking helps search engines understand, identify and expose the website as part of the world wide web.

#3. Focus on Responsive Design

Being mobile friendly is a key determinant for a strong online footprint. If your website has everything about SEO but is not responsive, it may not rank against competition that has a mobile-friendly design even with lesser SEO in it. Being scalable and responsive is imperative to your online success and directly compliments your SEO efforts.

A mobile ready website enhances your SEO capabilities and ensures you are not missing out on the millions of users who prefer mobile searching and transactions against the traditional desktop users.

Make sure you focus on the key elements such as user-friendly navigation, scalability, speed, design and interactive features such as CTAs to make the design engaging.

#4. Improve Your Keyword Research

If you want a long lasting digital footprint for your website, you must make sure you are targeting the right keywords. These keywords are responsible for several SEO metrics and alone determine if your prospective customer will land on your website or not.

Keywords that are ideal for your target segment must be appropriately injected in your content such as web copy, descriptions, blogs and guest posts, etc.

But while using top ranking keywords is important, not all keywords are worth ranking for and may not yield the results you need. Many keywords take time to rank and do not cover your product or service as effectively as others so make sure you pick your keywords wisely.

To avoid getting narrowed down on searches, you can use long tail keywords to feature several words. Long tail keywords are less competitive and are generally easier to rank on search engines.

You can use free tools such as Google Keyword Planner to find the right keywords for your target customer. If you want more detailed statistics, you can go for advanced tools with premium features.

#5. Start Outreach Activities

Aside from on-site SEO activities, it is also critical that you supplement your website with off-page activities to accredit your digital footprint. Outreach techniques such as link-building is a big part of the SEO toolbox and help your website get recognition from your peers that offer their platform to share your content.

Moreover, it also establishes a credible online presence that speaks volumes for your brand. Once you start getting a good flow of link juice towards your website you can diversify your outreach activities and expand your operations.

Guest posting is a good start, you can also post on forums, different directories, blogs, and journals, etc. However, you can’t just focus on textual content. The better strategy is to add a combination of posts such as infographics, press release, and even Gif based articles to earn backlinks from authoritative websites. Remember, quality always triumphs over quantity.

#6. Keep Track of Your Competitors

It may sound trivial but learning from your competitors should be an integral part of your SEO model. Being an online business you depend on several factors that equally govern both you and your competitors’ online footprint. Therefore, it is your job to find out why the neighbor next door is doing better at the same thing you are spending your efforts on.

Don’t hesitate to do a little bit of spying if it adheres to the rules set by search engines. Start by visiting their website and identify their design advantages, which gives them their unique proposition and how good is their SEO implementation. There are plenty of free tools you can use to find analytics of their website and put the results to your advantage. It’s also an effective means to look for new keywords and blog ideas for your website.

#7. Cover Technical Aspects of SEO

Creating a robust digital footprint requires SEO in its fullest spectrum. While many digital marketers get early success by focusing on the fundamental practices of SEO, they often neglect the technical side that matters most in the long haul.

By applying the technical side of SEO you can significantly improve the performance of your website and make your content is more crawlable for search engines. It also helps search engines identify what your content is about and accurately connects it with searches to enhance relevancy.

You can start by improving the speed of your website by getting it checked by a professional web developer. If that doesn’t work out, try changing your hosting provider or getting the site redesigned. You must also optimize the image alt tags, add Magento 2 HTML sitemap, implement an SSL certificate and fix crawl errors to strengthen the functional aspects of your website.

This article is contributed by Mirza Irfan, Lead Content Writer at FME extensions

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