SEO in 2020! Isn’t it an interesting subject to discuss? Needless to say that this is something that will bring the attention of mostly Business Owners and Online Entrepreneurs. Search Engine Optimization has become part of our online strategies and most businesses are now focusing more and more on an online audience for business survival and expansion. In 2020, no business can work at its optimum without a website!
The Internet is without any doubt, the largest marketplace to reach out and bring in new customers to your business. It definitely starts with a website but some would say that they don’t really need a website. These are people who focus on Social Media rather than their website.
Own a Website OR Use Social Media?
Opinions are different but here let me give you some basic yet important facts that you will always need to consider. Many small business owners will prefer to choose Social Media rather than having their own website. The main reason being that it is free as compared to the initial costs associated with having a website created and hosted for your company. Social Media might be a good start but I personally emphasize on having your own website and creating your own audience. Why?
Having a lot of likes and followers on Social Media is simple awesome! But!!! You don’t own NOTHING! Even your account may be restricted anytime. You don’t not have full hand on your audience.
If you own a website and get people to know your products and services directly through your website, this is something you own and is a great asset for your business. Fair enough, it will take much longer to build your audience compared to Social Media but the long-term outcomes are simply incomparable.
Is SEO still relevant in 2020?
Some might say it is and some might say it’s no more but the real fact is that SEO which is short for Search Engine Optimization is still important and even more important than before. However, it has evolved and may not be as it was in the past.
A couple of years ago, SEO was all about optimizing your website content by adding relevant keywords to let Google know that your website is about a specific subject. Doing so well, the ranking of the website will be improved in google search results. This was the very beginning of Search Engine Optimization. Later on, simply adding keywords to the content was not enough to prove relevancy. Thus, Google is now expecting better quality websites, properly coded and fast loading. In other words, you are somehow pressured to go to a professional if you want your website to have good ranking in the search results. You cannot just look for a template and host a website with your content as most templates are not nicely structured as per SEO requirements. I’m not saying that the themes and templates are bad but most of them, even though they might state that the template is SEO-friendly or optimized, there will still be quite some work left to fully optimized the template and the content. Moreover, website loading speed is now another key factor for ranking and in most cases, you will have a lot of work to do to get your website to a decent score, that is above 90% in Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom.
To achieve such score, you will surely need some good technical skills to make the required changes to get the right results.
The best strategy to apply for your business is therefore to have your own optimized website and to use social media to reach your audience with a focus of bringing your potential customers to your website so it may become an asset to you rather than to the social media.