With rising awareness around climate change and the need for environment-friendly initiatives, eco-friendly businesses have an edge over their regular counterparts in the market. Research suggests that in first-world countries almost one-third of customers are likely to give preference to eco-friendly brands and products as opposed to their regular alternatives. However, most eco-friendly businesses are led by individuals that are passionate about all things environment but have little know-how in marketing. This makes it difficult for eco-friendly businesses to get their name out amongst their target customers and this is where the need for search engine optimization comes in.
While search engine optimization is generally necessary for all businesses, it is even more crucial for green businesses, as “going green” has been a recurring trend in most mainstream companies’ marketing departments as of late. Any business that merely adds the term “green” to its landing page sees a soar in its website traffic, and hence the results for an actual eco-friendly business are likely to be off the charts. Hence, given below are seven ways how eco-friendly businesses can focus on their SEO:
1. By optimizing the title tags
While most eco-friendly businesses make the mistake of including their company name in their page titles, it is recommended that they refrain from doing so unless their company name consists of a maximum of five characters. Instead of your company name, your title page should have keywords that are relevant to your business such as “eco-friendly stationery” or “green home furnishings”. Not including your company name also ensures that Google’s search engine ranking system does not simply slash away the beginning of your webpage title while matching your web pages to relevant queries. Eco-friendly businesses may also include a CTA in their title tags instead of just basic information: for instance, a title tag “Shop eco-friendly stationery for your home and office” i.e with a CTA is much better than “Eco-friendly stationery for home and office.
2. By choosing the right keywords
Marketers need to pay special attention to keyword research as sometimes their target audience could be searching for highly specific terms such as a solar energy enthusiast in Connecticut searching for “Solar Energy Connecticut” or a green marketing fan from Hong Kong searching for “Green Digital Marketing News Hong Kong”. While choosing keywords to include in your website content, be sure to include both those trending in your respective industry and those that best fit what product or service you are offering. Be sure to include terms such as “eco-friendly”, “green”, and “sustainable” alongside your product offering and services to guarantee you relevant website traffic.
3. By optimizing your content
Eco-friendly companies can sometimes go overboard with emphasizing “greenness” in their website content. While the content on your web pages should feature relevant keywords and talk about environmental sustainability and about how your business will be contributing to the environment, you shouldn’t greenwash the content on your web pages. Be sure to include relevant, coherent, and consider the content on your web pages that is unique and beneficial for your target audience. A growing trend observed in search engine optimization that should be taken into account by eco-friendly businesses includes creating long-form content which is essentially blogs of 3000+ words. Long-form content is proven to bring in more shares, and relevant traffic and improve Google rankings.
4. By focusing on link building
Link building essentially refers to increasing the number of backlinks contributing to your web pages from other high authority and reputable sources over the internet. Link building contributes to your search engine optimization efforts as search engine crawlers assume and delegate some of the authority from those webpages to your website and hence raise your rank in their website index. To increase your link-building efforts, you could either seek help from a reputable SEO Blog and post as a guest blogger, exchange links with relevant industry experts and businesses in your field, list your business in reputable online directories, or discover broken links on high authority pages and offer to replace them. Eco-friendly businesses should also focus on internal link building to build an information hierarchy on their website. An ideal strategy for internal link building is to link low-performing web pages to high-performing ones.
5. By focusing on local SEO
Local SEO efforts are similar to regular SEO efforts and only differ in terms of their reach – while SEO may focus on building national and international recognition, local SEO focuses on improving your reach within a given area or locality which is extremely beneficial for small businesses. Companies that are just starting should first focus on building local SEO followed by a more comprehensive approach. To build local SEO, green companies should, first of all, claim their business listing on Google and other search engines, and include all relevant business information such as contact, address, and working hours. They should also localize their keywords, develop content relevant to locals and focus on listings in local forums and directories.
6. By focusing on User Experience
According to Google’s search algorithm, user experience is just as important as any other technical aspect when it comes to a website’s ranking. As an eco-friendly company, you can improve your website’s user experience by simplifying its navigation and making it mobile-friendly. You should also pay attention to adopting or curating a webpage format that is easy on the eyes and modern, which involves reducing text-heavy webpages, including headers and bullet points in presented content. Your website should also focus on its loading speed as Google views websites with a high loading speed poorly and ranks them accordingly. The loading speed can be improved by using optimized images in JPEG or PNG formats, enabling browser caching, and decreasing the server response time.
Conclusion
While focusing on anything technical can be a nuisance, especially if you lack the expertise within your company to do so, it is essential. Hence, whether you choose to seek help from a search marketing blog or outsource your SEO altogether, you mustn’t lose focus on your goal to improve your eco-friendly company’s search engine optimization.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
