Even if your website is beautiful to look at, it won’t get much traction if you haven’t paid attention to SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of tailoring your website’s many elements around a singular purpose: to provide a solution to the users searching for your product or services. That means paying close attention to everything from the language you’re using to the structure of your website.
Google and other search engines are constantly “crawling” every website, using an algorithm to rank your site in comparison to others. The higher your site appears in Google search results (SERPs), the more likely it is your target audience will navigate to a relevant page and take the actions you want them to take. Put simply, SEO improves your visibility online.
Read on to learn more about what SEO is and wy it’s important, as well as nine SEO improvement tips that can boost your digital marketing strategy.
What is SEO, and why is it important?
Today, when most people look for a product or service, they head to Google to get the information they need. They type in what they’re looking for, and Google delivers a set of search results that best match their intent. Think of it in terms of questions and answers: searchers ask a question and Google provides what it believes are the most relevant answers. It’s why a search for “Mexican food near me” will turn up a local taco spot or a query for “SEO website ranking tips” might turn up this article!
The problem is, Google is so good at what it does, most people don’t scroll past the first 10 or so results before either clicking or refining their search. If your business isn’t near the top of the page, how likely do you think it’ll be to get clicks? Chances are, they’ll end up on a competitor’s page at the top of the search results first.
SEO has everything to do with SERP visibility. The better you optimize your website around specific searcher intent, the more likely you are to rank among the top-seated results. If you can anticipate what people are looking for relative to your business, you can meet them where they search. That’s the strategy behind SEO.
Practice These Essential SEO Tips to Rank Better
Pushing your website up to the top of Google’s search engine results page—and keeping it there—requires consistent effort. While SEO trends and best practices are always changing, there are some key concepts that remain the same.
Here are the top nine SEO tips to ensure your website is well-positioned on Google, so you can capture search traffic that’s meaningful and relevant.
1. Know Your Keywords
The bulk of on-page SEO strategies and techniques revolve around keywords: the words your target market is searching for to find solutions to the problems they’re facing. Start by stepping inside the shoes of your potential customer and think about what they’d search for on Google. Consider the words or phrases they’d use to search for relevant products or services.
Once you’ve determined your target keywords, include them strategically in your site content, including web copy, blog posts, meta descriptions and more, so Google will rank your page for them. Here again, it helps to think in terms of answers to questions your audience will search for.
2. Create Engaging Content
No matter what product you sell or what services you provide, your website needs engaging, compelling content that provides value to your target market. This can take the form of anything from routine blog posts to video content, and it should answer the many questions a customer may have, providing them with key insights they can use.
Avoid stuffing your target keywords into your content! Google takes notice and will penalize you for this. Instead, create conversational content—remember, you’re speaking directly to your target audience. Even better is shareable content that will appear elsewhere on the web and continue to get your message across.
3. Include Keywords in Your Website Page URLs
Even your web page URLs make a difference in your SEO efforts. Include your target keywords in your URLs and focus on the most common and most searched appropriate words or phrases, and always choose the option with the highest search ranking.
This tip closely aligns with another, which is to keep the focus of your pages as specific as possible. Don’t bombard visitors with tangential information; instead, stay focused on what they’re looking for. That is to say, if the page is about Red Widgets, focus specifically on that product and make sure your URL is specific to a Red Widget keyword.
4. Improve Your Meta Data
Search engines use title tags and meta descriptions to display pages in SERPs. As your target market browses their search results, they’re looking closely for engaging and interesting information. If your page’s meta information doesn’t grab the attention of your target market, they won’t even click on them to view your content.
As you create (or re-write) your meta titles and descriptions, keep them short and sweet and use strong words that will pique the interest of someone scrolling through SERPs. Avoid just labeling the page with a utilitarian description and company name, and instead opt for more engaging verbiage that will grab the attention of those perusing SERPs.
5. Improve Your Site’s User Experience
Consider how a person from your target market interacts with your site. Aside from creating a visually-appealing website, you need to create one that works for your potential customers—one that’s seamless and intuitive. Prioritize UI and UX.
Search engines like Google are looking more closely at a website’s overall user experience as they determine SEO rankings. Google’s looking for sites that deliver quality experiences across platforms and devices.
Improving your site’s user experience involves tweaking a number of key components. It’s best to work with professional web designers like the team at MediaBlend to create user-friendly sites that rank higher on Google. We’ll help you improve user experience considerations like:
- Getting to know your user. Developing user personas so you can determine what type of content resonates with your target market, as well as what keywords they’re searching for to solve their problems.
- Improving functionality. At the most basic level, a website needs to be functional and easy to use. Determine whether the basic framework and structure of your website is working and make improvements where necessary.
- Focusing on the homepage. Think about your homepage as the first impression you make on potential customers. Include your main message, important branding information and site navigation on your homepage, and make sure the most important content—like CTAs and sales language—is near the top, so you can make sure it’s seen.
- Improving your page speed. Slow, lagging websites are frustrating for users, especially with the rise of mobile devices. Users expect fast results for the content they want, and slow page speeds can ruin your website’s user experience, not to mention it’s SEO ranking. Start by compressing images, reducing redirects and minimizing HTML to help your pages load faster.
- Including clear calls to action. Customers are looking for visual cues to get to the content that’s important to them. You can greatly improve the user experience of your website by including clear calls to action, so users know exactly where to go to reach their objectives.
6. Design With Mobile in Mind
With more people than ever browsing websites on the go, you need to take a mobile-first approach to designing your website. Also called responsive web design, this method enables websites to fit the screens of different devices automatically, reducing annoying user operations like panning, scrolling or zooming when browsing the web. By creating a responsive site, you’re more likely to meet your target audience where they are, no matter what device or platform they’re using.
7. Grow Natural Links
Keep in mind that your site doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Google views the web as a large “community,” which means they’re looking closely at the number of organic and quality inbound links to your site. They use these natural links to rank the relevance and reliability of your site by the number of times it’s been “recommended” by third parties.
There are several ways to do this: guest blogging, asking for partner or supplier mentions, leveraging brands and influencers to share your products or services and more.
8. Monitor Your Progress
If you’re tracking your website’s SEO, you need to set up two key SEO tracking tools—Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These platforms let you track SEO metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings and even the performance of your competitors. By looking at the hard data, you can experiment with your SEO efforts and make everything from tweaks to important changes.
Maybe you need to target new keywords, or maybe your website needs a total overhaul? By monitoring your website’s progress, you can gain key insights into your website’s SEO and why it ranks where it does.
9. Hire an SEO Agency
While SEO strategies may seem like common sense, they can be difficult to implement the right way. By working with an expert SEO agency, like MediaBlend, you can implement proven SEO techniques and stay up to date on how your website is performing, not only against your most important keywords, but also against your competition.
Use SEO improvement tips to rank at the top of SERPs
Ready for your website to rise through the rankings on Google? Visibility on search engine rankings has never been more important for businesses, regardless of what industry you’re in or what customers you serve.
MediaBlend is the leader in SEO in Orange County. We’ve helped countless businesses implement SEO techniques and best practices into their digital marketing strategy. Reach out to our SEO experts today to see how we can help you reach new customers, get new leads and make more sales.