Are you an SEO beginner? Not sure how to rank higher in search engines to earn more organic traffic? Here’s a simple guide for SEO newbies.
Over the last two decades, search engine optimization (SEO) has been described in many different ways by marketing and web development professionals. But at its core, SEO is simply a way to rank for relevant keywords to help your website show up near the top of Google and other leading search engines. This allows for your site to earn extra organic traffic, the life blood of any successful website. The alternative is expensive PPC advertising like Google Ads and Facebook.
To get a better understanding of what exactly goes into search engine optimization, read below for 8 essentials of SEO for business beginners.
1. Smart Search Strategy
Successful search engine optimization strategy requires an investment of time and resources. That’s why it’s very important to start with a well-developed strategy. By thinking through issues like which keywords are going to bring in actual leads or customers, you can ensure that the investments you make in SEO will help move the needle for your investment.
2. On-Page Optimization
Since your business website is the foundation of all SEO efforts, it’s important to have it fully optimized. In addition to things like using the right keywords in your H1/H2/H3 headings, image alt text, and meta descriptions… you also need to address any technical issues. Specifically, Google has placed a lot of emphasis on page speed and mobile friendliness (read more on these factors below) in recent years. Having a site that’s slow or doesn’t load easily on devices with smaller screens will hamper all of your SEO efforts. Making sure your site has an SSL certificate will also improve your site rank as well.
Taking care of on-page SEO is essential for ensuring that all necessary pages on your website are crawled, indexed, and ranked so they have the chance to bring you organic search traffic.
3. Create Consistent And Compelling Content
Related to on-page optimization, regularly publishing quality content is essential for helping to rank for all the keywords that are relevant to your business. The type of content you publish will likely be a mixture of blog posts and landing pages. Utilizing SEO strategies like internal linking will help maximize the rankings of these pages. Hiring a blogger outreach agency would also boost your content marketing success.
4. Build Better BackLinks
Google still relies on links from other websites to determine popularity. However, backlinks link building can easily go wrong when people do things like focusing on quantity instead of quality. And it’s also important to understand that the optimal approach to link building for a local business website will differ from a site that’s trying to rank for more generic terms.
Google has made it clear that link quality is much more important than quantity. So even though services that promise hundreds of links may sound appealing at first, those links are much more likely to hurt your rankings instead of helping them. Focusing on link building opportunities like outreach and press mentions will do much more for your rankings over the long-term, according to SEO and digital marketing expert Mike Schiemer.
5. Analytics Data
Ranking data is important for seeing how a website is advancing on target search engine results pages. But it’s also important to go beyond that and look at analytics data like average page views. Seeing this information will help confirm if the pages that are ranking highly are actually providing visitors with what they’re searching for, whether they are looking for local hair salons or a high-rated car dealership.
6. Speed Up Your Website
The amount of emphasis Google puts on page speed has continued to increase over the last few years. We’re at the point where it’s extremely difficult for a slow website to rank well in Google. If you have concerns that the amount of time it takes your site to load is hurting your rankings, working with website development in Ohio professionals can get your site running faster.
7. Optimize for Mobile Devices
Like page speed, Google has made mobile one of the most important elements in their ranking algorithm. With many sites receiving more than half of all their traffic from mobile devices, using techniques like responsive design to create a seamless experience on mobile is just as important for your overall online efforts as it is for SEO. If you’re unhappy with your site’s current mobile performance, web design in Cincinnati by Web Strategy Plus can help.
8. Update Older Content
Does your site have a blog that’s been regularly updated over the last few years? If so, your site has a lot of valuable content. While some of those posts are probably bringing in a significant amount of traffic, others may not be performing as well as they should. By looking through your analytics, you’ll be able to identify posts that are good candidates for updating. Taking the time to perform tasks like keyword optimization and adding extra information to those posts may be all that’s needed to move them to the top of Google.
Start Smart SEO For Business Beginners And Brands
There’s a lot that goes into developing and executing a successful SEO strategy. If you want to ensure that you have a knowledgeable professional on your side to help with all of this work, you can easily learn more about how businesses should approach search engine optimization.