Patronage is the lifeblood of business. Offering a product or service is paramount and offering a good one is almost divine. But without getting it across to the people your business matters most to – and of course, convincing them to use it – everything goes to waste. This is where your company's search engine optimization strategy comes in.

It is estimated that 63% of the world has access to the internet as of today, and the number is still growing geometrically. That makes it the largest global community, as over 5 billion people could be accessed from anywhere in the world over the internet. If you need help creating the perfect SEO strategy to make an impression, look no further… You're in for a delight!

To begin with, search engine optimization is improving the qualities and content of a website or web page to make it more efficient for a search engine. 95% of all search traffic does not go beyond Google’s first page, with most of that number choosing from the first five results. That means you should be leveraging every factor out there to be amongst the chosen ones. This mindset creates the foundation on which your SEO strategy is built.

The next step is getting familiar with the two significant parts of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO deals with trying to optimize the parts of your web page that are within your control. These include elements like your content, loading speed, etc. Off-page SEO focuses more on trying to optimize your web page ranking using features not directly impacted from your site, such optimizing your site's credibility to be back-linked. Things to consider during the development of your SEO strategy include:

• Keywords: This is a crucial part of search engine optimization. Keywords are search terms that are similar and related to the topic on which your content borders. The more relevant keywords appear throughout your marketing content from the top to the bottom of your page, the more the search engine considers it a relevant search result and moves it to the top end of search results. As such, it is essential to research the most relevant keywords to include in your content. But it’s important to not over optimize the page but to find a good balance. As always, focus on the user first when optimizing your website.

• Competitor Analysis: Another important step would be looking up keywords relevant to your marketing content and analyzing the results to see where you stack up. This can be done via tools like Ahrefs, MOZ, and SEM Rush. After considering a keyword search for the phrase that you want to rank for, you should check out the highest-ranked search results. This is to check out the kind of content (intent) that Google prefers and features they possess. You could subsequently decide to adopt their key features in your article (without copying of course) or choose to create new content different from the existing ones with a slightly different angle. Google loves variety in the search results and if your piece of content is longer, in-depth and has covered the topic better than the #1 guy, your chances of ranking high will increase drastically.

• Content Quality: Search engines are also business ventures. To give the best experience possible, they are engineered to offer the most useful content to their users. As such, they scrutinize content available on the internet and rank them as search results based on their usefulness. To develop an effective SEO strategy, it is essential that you maximize the quality of your marketing content. It must not just be relevant to the search term but also be of a precise and informative nature. Moreover, they must be well-structured, readable, and enjoyable to readers, while multimedia content is also well-considered.

• Website Quality: It might seem rather unbelievable, but a website’s quality is very instrumental in search engine optimization. As posited, search engines are geared towards providing the best and most favorable results for their users. This is not relegated to just the content but also the site quality. Features like the website UI and UX, site loading speed, and elements are considered by users and, thus, by search engines. This makes it essential for businesses to optimize their site features.

• Link Inclusion: A qualitative SEO strategy also incorporates internal links and backlinks. Internal links bridge different pages of your website to ensure that the gamut of information you offer is easily accessible and interconnected. Backlinks, however, are links to your site that have been included in content across different websites. This increases the number of leads generated by your site and lends a measure of popularity to your site. Please note, it’s not the quantity of the backlinks but the quality of them that matters more. Getting backlinks from spammy communities can do more harm than good to your website, so make sure to pick your partners wisely.

These are some of the most important tactics to create an effective and result-driven SEO strategy. Search engine optimization is a highly rewarding venture for your business but is equally tasking. There are over 200 ranking signals in Google and quite a bit of it remains left to experienced professionals. There are agencies specialized in successfully handling your SEO strategies for you.