8 Simple Steps for Optimizing Your Website for SEO
How to Get More Clicks to Your Website
8 Simple Steps for Optimizing Your Website for SEO
Conduct an SEO Audit
Conducting an SEO Audit means analyzing how well your website is indexed and ranked by search engines. You conduct an SEO Audit to identify foundational issues that are affecting your organic search performance. These issues may be causing your website to fly under the radar when your target audience searches for content related to your website. Results of an SEO Audit typically include your website or page’s ranking for a specific search term, how many keywords you are organically ranking for, your total number of backlinks, your domain authority score, your volume of organic traffic, and number of SERP features. You can then compare these metrics to your competitors to understand how well you are performing against others in the same space and for the same organic traffic. An SEO Audit will help you make more strategic decisions on how to improve your website’s ranking in the search engine results page. This is one of the most important steps because it will highlight the key steps you must take to improve your website’s organic ranking and overall visibility online.
Conduct thorough keyword research
Topical keyword research
Topical keywords or topical authority is the process of creating keywords that match your content. Basically, search engines use this to determine how relevant your content is to the topic or keyword. It is vital to keep your page content relevant and useful. Selecting high-opportunity keywords that are relevant to your page is an essential part of gaining traffic to your content. Selecting the appropriate topical keywords not only boosts your search rankings but also proves to your audience that your content is exactly what they are searching for, ultimately building trust and brand loyalty.
Competitor keyword research
Knowing what keywords and rankings your competitors have earned is critically important in ensuring that you are focusing on the correct keywords for your own content. It will help you compete in the online world and help you ensure a high return on investment for your content creation. Knowing what keywords your competitors are ranking for will give you the advantage to focus on keywords that they are not, thus capitalizing on their blind spots. You can also work to outrank your competitors for the same keywords they are currently ranked for in order to siphon away some of their current traffic—but this can be difficult if you have a new website or low rankings currently. However, analyzing their content and search rankings can illuminate why their website is ranking higher than yours and give you insight into how you can increase your own rankings and organic traffic. Competitor keyword research can also help you discover keywords or keyword phrases you hadn’t thought of yet. Sometimes seeing others' work can spark inspiration and gives you new, out-of-the-box ideas. With this information, it gives you a step up on your competition and the advantage of new unused keywords.
Short tail vs. long tail keywords
Short tail keywords describe broad, simple terms that are very general, such as “food” or “shoes.” These search terms typically receive a very high volume of traffic, however they are very difficult to rank for on the first page of a search engine results page because there may be millions of pages already published that are ranking for that term. Long tail keywords are more specific and usually include three to five, or possibly more words, such as “healthy food for weight loss” or “high heeled shoes for formal events.” When someone uses a short tail keyword, they are typically looking for something generic or are taking in general information when being introduced to a new subject. When using long tail keywords, people are usually looking for something very specific. Because there is typically lower search volume and competitive score for long tail keywords, it is easier to rank for them by creating very specific niche content. Over time, when you publish many posts and pages that revolve around a central subject or theme, you can begin to improve your ranking for those broad, short tail keywords. It is important to create a content plan that helps you optimize for both long tail and short tail keywords so that you can gain initial organic traffic from niche key terms and work to increase your overall organic traffic for your brand or product category over the long term.
Produce long and value-rich content
Providing people with the information they are looking for in a qualitative way is necessary to keep people engaged and coming back to your site. This will build your credibility in their mind. When people know you provide valuable information they will return to your site when they are needing more or additional information. Also, longer-form content allows you many more opportunities to seed your web pages with keywords and helps increase session duration times, which will both work together to boost your organic search rankings.
Optimize for on-page SEO — priority keywords in key places
Placing your priority keywords within the key places search engines are scanning your page for will help lead searchers directly to your content. These key places include the page title, the meta description, your page headers, and within your body copy. It is important to place your keywords within your page content in a natural way. “Keyword stuffing,” or the practice of placing keywords throughout your page in unnatural and irrelevant ways, will actually harm your SEO rankings. Ensuring on-page SEO can be a time-consuming process, but the payoff is well worth it when your site begins attracting consistent volumes of healthy, engaged organic traffic.
Optimize for off-page SEO
There are many ways to optimize for off-page SEO such as, guest blogging, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and gaining brand mentions. Brand mentions can be many things: a simple shout out, a review, backlinks, or just a tag in someone else's post. When web visitors are presented with your brand mention, it provides another impression of your brand and reminder to seek out more information about you. By associating yourself with other brands your audience respects, it will imply that you are similarly valuable.
Being active on social media keeps you in people's mind and keeps them thinking about your products. Social media is also a great way to introduce new products and new ideas. Giving them a sneak peak on social media and then showing that you have more information on your website can be a great gateway between those who view your content on social and gaining more views on your website.
Connecting with people who work in the same/similar field can open many doors. Guest writing on someone else page will introduce you to their followers. They will be interested in your ideas and topic because we already know they are interested in that area. Same as if you have a guest writer on your website. This will bring their followers to your site, they will start with reader the guest bloggers post but then scroll through your other stuff. They will give you credibility because you are now linked with the guest blogger that they already know. This is similar to brand mentions.
Ultimately, the more total mentions your brand receives online, the more instances your company name is featured on web content that is crawled and indexed by search engines—helping to improve your SEO ranking with search engines.
MOBILE RESPONSIVENESS IS KEY
How many things do you search for on the internet everyday? According to Internet Live Stats, 5.5 billion searches are conducted on Google per day and over 63,000 search queries are done per second! The vast majority of these searches are being conducted from mobile devices. A recent Hitwise report found that nearly 60 percent of all online searches are now carried out on a mobile device, with some sectors (Food and Beverage) reaching 72 percent. This means your website needs to be as accessible and aesthetically pleasing on mobile devices as it is on the desktop version. In fact, most search engine algorithms today will in fact reduce your ranking or direct traffic away from your site if it does not feature responsive design. If searchers can’t find the information they are looking for on your site on their phone, they will quickly return to the search results and find another site that is better. When building your website, it is worth every extra minute spent to ensure the mobile version is as good as (or better than!) the desktop experience.
Speed up the pages
We live in a fast paced world, and when visitors have to wait for the page to load they lose interest, get distracted and lose focus on your content. They move onto another, faster, site. In fact, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). (Portent, 2019). When it comes to sourcing information, access to the internet has yielded an instant gratification culture—we want information and we want it right now. Speeding up your pages will keep your reader's interest and keep them on your site. They will also be more likely to click on other pages because they know the page will load quickly so they will receive the information while their attention is still on you and your business. Longer session durations and greater numbers of page views per session all signal to search engine algorithms that the content on your page is indeed relevant for the search term the visitor entered, and all work together to boost your SEO rankings.
Get quality backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important factors when getting your site ranked and an area that is often overlooked. A backlink is any link from another website driving visitors back to your website. However, not every backlink is created equally. While a large volume of backlinks can help boost your SEO, backlinks from toxic domains can harm your domain authority score and search rankings. Toxic domains are websites that have been marked as low-quality or suspicious. You can use SEO intelligence platforms to audit your website backlinks and evaluate whether the domains linking to your site are valuable or toxic, and you can take steps to disavow backlinks (or indicate to search engines that you do not want to be associated with that toxic domain). Think of backlinks like a sort of “internet credit score”—having a high number or quality backlinks directly correlates with a higher ranking on Google.
