Optimizing your website to be found online can be a very daunting task, as trying to compete with some of the biggest names on the web can seem overwhelming and insurmountable. However, bringing your website’s search ranking up is a lot less of a difficult task than it may seem. The main focus for you will be to improve your SEO, meaning Search Engine Optimization. This will involve a number of different tasks, but once improved will mean that your website will be working exactly as hard as it needs to be. But how do you go about doing this? Read on for the top tips to optimize your website and bring it higher in the search results.
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What Is SEO?
As stated earlier, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process of increasing your website’s traffic via search engine results, getting people to click through to your website simply because it is higher on their search result. SEO helps your website become more discoverable, as whenever a potential customer searches for terms relating to your brand they will have a better chance of finding your webpage. If you have a company that does, say, computer repair, someone searching specifically for computer repair will have a good chance of finding your website. However, if you also have an article on your website about console repair, or what parts people should upgrade within their computer, people looking for these things also have a good chance of finding your company.
So, with a good understanding of what SEO is, how can you go about improving your website to ensure the best search results for your brand?
Analyze Your Website Data
Your first step will be to take a look at your website and every analytic available to you. One piece of data may not be helpful in the long run, but if you can get access to a lot of information you can start to draw patterns and conclusions. Say, for example, if a large percentage of your visitors ignore your call to action, you may need to adjust it in order to make sure it’s more enticing. If most people spend only a short amount of time on your homepage before leaving, it’s likely that you’ll need to change the design of the site itself. Grab as much data as you can, including your click-through rate, conversation rate, daily traffic and search engine position.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is vital for improving your SEO, and so it can be best to utilise a professional SEO keyword research tool to help you. Sadly, gone are the days in which you could pick a keyword, write an article about it and see yourself rise through the ranks. In today’s world, it’s best to find long-tail keywords that fit your prospective customer’s user intent. Though these aren’t the broad search terms that you may feel you require, these long tail keywords will tend to help you find specific customers who are near the end of their purchase journey.
Create Great Content
One of the best ways to not only skyrocket your SEO, but to also hugely improve your audience’s opinion of your site is to write good content and write a lot of it. Though an article doesn’t have to be worryingly long, longer articles do tend to include more information for people to read, and this signals to the search engines that your site is better as it is more informative. Your SEO stats will also increase if your readers spend more time on your website, as this shows that your content is worthwhile. The best way to find out how long your articles should be is to look at your top ten competitors and have a look at their blogs. If their content is longer than yours, you should increase your word count.
Optimize On-Page SEO
Headlines, headings, subheadings, URLs, meta tags and more all make up your on-page SEO and factor heavily into your overall SEO. While there aren’t a huge number of hard and fast rules for your on-page SEO, there are some things you can do to improve your SEO. The primary keyword you’re using in your article should appear in the headline, meta description as well as appearing a few times in the main body. Also be sure to sprinkle some of your related keywords too as it means that this article could be found through other searches. An important tip that many forget is also to include image alt text with clear descriptions, as well as being sure to break up your paragraphs into readable chunks with clear subheadings. Especially with Google today, writing well could mean the difference between being on the first page of the search compared to the third or fourth.
Speed Up Your Pages
The one thing that can entirely destroy your SEO as well as visitor interaction is the speed at which your pages load. If you have a slow loading website, most people will often move off of the site before it loads, as their time is precious. If your page isn’t as fast as possible, people will leave to find faster sites, even if the quality isn’t as high.
As you can see, SEO optimization isn’t that difficult so long as you can keep an eye on the small things as well as the big, and can continue to output content. These tips should help ensure that your website stays relevant and high on the search engine results.