Add Row
Add
I've written briefly about it before, but search engine optimization (SEO) has been a key marketing
strategy for businesses since the early days of the internet. Using proper SEO techniques
can help you generate more organic – i.e., free – visitor traffic to your website
and other online properties.
SEO, in a nutshell, is the process of improving your website
so it ranks more highly in search engine results.
WHY SEO?
SEO makes your website more attractive and understandable to search
engines, and when you’re practicing good search engine optimization, they’re more likely to show
your site to people searching for the products and services you offer.
It’s an ongoing process. Search engines like Google, Bing,
Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and YouTube are constantly updating their formulas, and your competitors
are always making changes to improve their own rankings.
SEO is not a one-time effort but a continuous cycle of
improvement. To be competitive and maintain and improve your website’s ranking,
you need to regularly update and optimize your content, monitor how well it
performs in search results, and then make adjustments based on the latest
trends and changes in search engine algorithms.
The 3 SEO Environments
Just to briefly recap before digging deeper, search engine optimization needs to occur in the following three areas:
On-page SEO refers to optimizing the content and HTML
source code of individual pages on your website. Including relevant search
terms (keywords), producing quality content, optimizing the behind-the-scenes meta
tags, and improving internal linking within your website are all examples of
on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO involves taking steps outside your
website to improve your rankings. This includes building backlinks from
other relevant and reputable websites, social media marketing, and online
reputation management.
Technical SEO focuses on improving the technical
aspects of your website to ensure it's easy for search engines to crawl and
index. This includes optimizing how quickly your website loads on PCs, laptops,
and mobile devices, how mobile-friendly it is, the type of architecture your
site uses, and fixing any crawl errors.
The 7 Key Steps To Effective SEO
Interestingly enough, in this world of constant change, the
following seven SEO
strategies have remained consistently effective in helping websites achieve
high rankings in search results:
1. It all starts with smart keyword research. On-page. Choosing
the right keywords is essential to having great SEO. Place them strategically
in your page titles, headings, meta descriptions and throughout your content and
you’ll increase their relevancy to search engines.
Keyword research can help you understand the searcher’s
intent. For example, were they just looking for information, or do the keywords
they’re using to search with actually signal an intent to buy? Create appropriate
content around each of those keywords and you’ll see better conversion rates. Long-tail
keywords frequently signal buyer intent.
Keyword research can also be useful in determining new
content creation. By identifying popular topics and related keyword queries,
you can create new content that better addresses the interests and needs of your
target audience.
2. Update old content. On-page. If you wish to keep re-using existing content, update it periodically to give the search engines something new to re-index. You’ll improve the quality and relevance of the content by bringing it up to date with new insights and user enhancements.
Ways to do that include adding recent data, updating
outdated statistics, incorporating new information, refining readability and
refining your keyword selection. The search platforms will see and reward you
for making these updates.
Benefits include easier crawling and indexing of your content
by search engines, helping reduce bounce rates on your website, and streamlining
the buyer’s journey to improve conversion rates.
4. Merge duplicate content. On-page. Google gets
confused by duplicate content and may not know which version to index and rank,
diluting your content’s ranking power. Combining duplicate content helps
concentrate the ranking potential into a single web page, improving its chances
of being indexed and showing up in search results.
Merging duplicate content also helps avoid keyword cannibalization,
which occurs when you have multiple pages targeting the same keywords and they’re
all competing against each other in search results. Merging helps concentrate keyword authority
and reduces this problem.
5. A/B test your website’s meta tags. On-page. Today,
the meta tags that count the most for ranking are the page’s title and description
tags. Develop two versions of each for a specific webpage and split the
visitor traffic between the two so that one half see the A version and the
other half the B version.
Monitor their performance over time, analyze the results,
and apply the winning tag versions to optimize the webpage for all visitors.
6. Build backlinks to your website. Off-page. Backlinks
are links to your website that someone puts on their own website. Not only can
they send more traffic to your website, backlinks from relevant, high-quality
sites sends signals to Google that your website is legitimate, authoritative
and worth ranking more highly.
Backlinking strategies include guest blogging on other
reputable websites in your industry with a backlink to your own, including a
backlink in your press releases, and submitting your website to popular high-traffic
business directories like YP.com, Yahoo! Local.com and Foursquare.com.
7. Create a great UX (user experience). On-page + Technical. UX stands for user experience. You want visitors to stay as long as possible on your website. The more time a visitor spends there, the more relevant Google considers it to be, the more you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings, and the better your chances of engaging and converting them into new customers / clients / patients.
Visitors appreciate well-designed websites that are easy to
navigate, load quickly, offer engaging content, are mobile-friendly, and are
accessible to all users. Websites not built this way have a higher bounce
rate (i.e., abandonment rate), and Google penalizes these types of sites with
lower rankings.
Your Plan
First, conduct an SEO audit of your website and perform steps 1 - 4. The goal is to
identify and fix any low-performing pages, pages that target the same keywords, and pages
with outdated content.
Then, once you’ve made changes to those pages and your content is ship-shape, focus on the remaining 3 steps and get after it.
The Bottom Line
It’s a lot to do, granted, but don’t ignore these issues or
keep putting things off. Today, Google more than ever is taking bad content
into account when it evaluates (crawls) your website – which, on average, it does every few
days - and not doing anything will start hurting you if it's not already.
If you need help with your SEO, let's chat.
Write A Comment