Why SEO Should Be a Primary Concern For Your Publishing/Journalism Business
If you decide to become an entrepreneur and pursue your dreams, then you are destined for a lot of hard work. Owning a business is no walk in the park, especially if you build that company from scratch. There are endless challenges to overcome each day that will determine whether this brand can succeed.
One obstacle that will block your way to success is the lack of a customer base. When you first get started, you have zero customers. To make enough money for the business to stay afloat, you need to quickly build a customer base to make sales and generate revenue. For years, you may not even turn a profit since all your revenue will go back into the business.
There are many ways to attract customers to your brand. Marketing is one of the key principles that new business owners should understand, and advertising in 2023 nearly necessitates a strong online presence. Authority online can be created with search engine optimization (SEO). Let’s talk about why SEO is necessary for publishing/journalism brands.
The Beginning of the Buyer’s Journey
If you are an entrepreneur, then you have probably heard of the buyer’s journey. It is the process that an individual goes through when making a purchasing decision, from the recognition of a need to the sale itself. In 2023, the buyer’s journey often starts online for the vast majority of your potential customers. When they realize they have a need, the first thing they might do is search for solutions on Google or another console. This will guide them toward the type of solution they want to choose, moving them to the next phase, where they search for businesses to provide that solution. If your publishing website never shows up near the top of the results for relevant searches, then organic traffic to your website will be extremely limited.
Establishing a Local Presence
In the early years of the existence of your brand, you will likely rely heavily on a certain geography for most of your business. This is true for publishing websites that specialize in certain locations. However, if the people in your community do not know about your company, how will they ever know to visit the website? Local SEO is critical to building up your presence in the community you serve. One of the simplest ways to do so is to complete a Google My Business profile for your brand which can help it get listed on Google results pages when local people look up relevant keywords and phrases. Without this tool, it may take a long time to build enough authority online for your pages to move up the rankings.
Competitors Are Doing it Too
Even if you feel comfortable with the customer base you have built to this point and most of your audience does not find you online, there is still a distinct disadvantage if you do not focus on SEO for your website. Your competitors almost certainly are. This means they are taking advantage of the online traffic to carve out their market share of customers. Eventually, their efforts could take customers away from your business. You must find a way to invest in SEO, even if you do not have the knowledge or energy to make changes yourself. You could always look to some of the best link-building services in the USA to partner with a firm that has expertise in growing your brand’s online authority through link acquisition on other publishing sites.
Digital Marketing is Still Growing
Maybe you have attained a level of success based on more traditional marketing methods such as newspaper ads or magazine articles. However, these methods are not going to be successful forever. As the world gets deeper into the digital age, more and more audiences will rely almost entirely on the Internet for their shopping needs. This means those traditional methods may become less effective with time. If you do not start investing in SEO now, then your website will be far behind the competition, and you will have to expend even more time and effort into catching up. It is better to get started now than to wait until your other marketing channels have already failed.
How to Improve SEO
Now that you understand the reasons for doing so, you will have to figure out how to improve your position in search results pages. Many aspects of SEO can increase your site’s authority online, including backlink building, optimized images, mobile optimization, keyword research and implementation, meta descriptions, optimized headings/subheadings, a working sitemap, internal links, and more.
This may all sound confusing and overwhelming to a publishing business owner who is just trying to keep their young company alive. Fortunately, there are many digital marketing resources, from courses online to advertising firms, that can help you improve your company’s online presence with SEO, so start researching now to take advantage of these tools.
