Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital digital marketing tool that not only makes your website more visible, but can also help build brand awareness, strengthen your brand’s trustworthiness, and connect you with new customers or clients. A proven tool to yield success, every business with an online presence should consider including SEO as a part of their digital marketing strategy. However, with a long list of complex elements and considerations, implementing an optimized strategy to set yourself apart from competitors can be challenging.
With this in mind, we’ve laid out five simple ways you can begin to improve your SEO:
1 . Incorporate Keyword Planning
Making sure your website is relevant to your customers or clients should always be the goal with improving your SEO, and the best way to do this is with keyword planning. Keyword planning is the process of researching the popular terms being searched for around your business and strategically including them in website content. You can start doing this by going through each page on your website and identifying what your target audience might be searching for to find the webpage, from there you would use terms from that phrase and research how popular they are on search engines in the location of your business.
Once you’ve narrowed down which terms are popular and relevant for your business and location, you can start incorporating them into their specific webpages by adding them in the URL, titles and body text. While this may seem like a daunting task to audit your entire website for keywords, there are tools, like Google Keyword Planner, and professionals, like us, who can also help you accomplish this.
2. Optimize Your Content
Optimizing your content is the number one way to improve your SEO. As mentioned, the best way to do this is by incorporating keywords, but there are additional steps to be taken to establish SEO-friendly content. Another key indicator of a relevant website on search engines is regularly updated content. Accomplishing this can be as simple as giving your pages a refresh quarterly or regularly posting blogs. It is also important to be updating webpage content that may not be performing well. This can be done by looking at your website analytics and targeting the weaker performing pages as the ones to be updating using keyword research and updated language.
Ensuring your content has a high readability is also crucial in maintaining or improving your SEO. What this means is that you’re formatting your content for the web by having shorter paragraph and mixed sentence lengths, as well as including subheaders and images to keep it visually interesting.
3. Use Strategic URLs and Metadata
The URL and meta descriptions on a web page are a key factor in how a search engine determines what your content is about. On the backend of each web page, you’ll have the ability to create title, description and keyword metadata. While these are typically created at the same time as a new web page, they can always be altered after the fact to reflect updated content. With both URLs and metadata, using concise and clear language that includes your keywords will greatly help your SEO. You will also want to choose a consistent structure in how you write your URL and metadata so that you can continue to use it for future posts and web pages.
4. Include Alt Tags for Images and Videos
Visual content often leverages SEO better than written content, but only if alt tags are added. Including alt tags to all your images and videos allow search engines to index your image correctly in searches by providing them with information on what is being displayed in the picture. It also allows users who use text-only browsers to still access the content on your website. The best way to write an alt tag for an image is to be very descriptive by including as much detail as possible, while also being distinctive by not repeating the page contents either. Similar to keywords, it’s important to be relevant and concise in the wording you chose as well.
5. Ensure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
With over 60% of Google searches coming from a mobile device, the shift from using desktop devices to mobile is happening quicker than you’d expect. This is why it’s important that your content is user-friendly on both platforms to ensure it isn’t hindering your SEO. One way to achieve this is by ensuring your website loads quickly. There also isn’t room for filler copy on a small mobile screen, so being strategic and succinct with the content included on web pages is important. Furthermore, ensuring your UI (user interface) design is intuitive to make navigating on a small screen as easy as possible will contribute to improved search rankings and performance. Lastly and most simply, make sure your site has the most important information at the top and uses easy-to-read and larger fonts.
Even at a basic level, SEO can require a lot of different techniques and tactics. If your business is in need of guidance when it comes to improving your SEO, feel free to contact one of our experts at LRO Solutions today.
