Regardless of the industry you are in, if you want your business to remain competitive in the digital landscape, you need to work on your visibility.
Some things have become universal nowadays like every brick and mortar store now needs a website. And every house needs an Internet connection. I can certainly relate to it because when we moved to California from Toledo, my kids couldn’t wait for us to have the Internet. We signed up for Spectrum Internet Only till I got my job.
By optimizing your website for Google, you can expand your reach and drive more traffic to your website. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a short-term thing. It requires consistent time and effort. However, it pays off significantly if you want to reach out to potential customers. Start with these tips to make your way up:
1: Do Keyword Research
There is so much you should be doing. To keep it simple, start by keyword research. Look for key phrases that your target audience uses to search for your products, services and any other thing related to your brand.
Once you have prepared a list of keywords, the next thing on your list must be to create targeted content relevant to the user’s search query. An effective tool to use is the Google Keyword Planner. It helps identify relevant keywords.
2: Create SEO Optimized Content
You need to create optimized content for your website. It must be keyword enriched and catchy. Marketing professionals say that on-page content development is an effective SEO strategy. While you work on generating optimized content, make sure it’s mistake-free, optimized for mobile and written to address the needs of your target audience. Include valuable links to external as well as internal content.
3: Get Backlinks
Backlinks play a very significant role in improving your Google ranking. The more incoming links you have to your website from high authority domains, the higher your website’s authority will be. This will also bring more traffic to your website.
4: Fix the Broken Links
You can establish the authority of your website through quality links. If your website constantly shows 404 errors because of broken links, this will have a negative impact on user experience. In other words, your search engine ranking will reduce. To identify broken links, use tools like Dead Link Checker.
5: Optimize the Images
Images must be an important part of your website. Don’t underestimate the importance of optimizing them. Large images can take up a lot of space on your website. This affects the page load time.
The best remedy is to compress the images and then upload them. Don’t forget to add descriptive file names and alt text.
6: Use H1 and H2 tags
Headers make your content readable and easier to understand for not just humans but search engines also. There is a correlation between Google search rank and head tags in the content body. These tags are a great way of showing the structure of your content and emphasize the key points.
7: Work On the Page Speed
Google has started using mobile page speed as a ranking factor. Although this speed update will affect a small percentage of websites only, you must make your website fast. The less time a web page takes to load, the better your website will perform. This improves user experience.
8: Aim for Zero Position
Whenever a user enters something in the Google search bar, Google pulls content from relevant websites and displays the answer in a featured snippet.
This answer box is above the first search result. If you are able to get your content into the featured snipped, this will boost the visibility of your brand and increase credibility at the same time. So how do you have your content selected for a featured snippet? This will take a little work. Search for queries related to your business and prepare authoritative answers.
9: Check Your Ranking Again
After you have made the necessary changes in your website, give it a week and check your Google ranking again. If you don’t see a difference within a week, you aren’t going to see any change at all. This means you need to re-work your strategy, come up with an action plan and then implement it. Even a few small changes can have a huge impact on the ranking of your website especially if the page was not well optimized.
10: Optimize Content for Voice Search
By 2020, half of all online searches will be done through voice search. You must have used Google Voice or Siri to check the weather, search for a nearby restaurant, etc. My last voice search was about the Spectrum channel lineup. I wanted to know what premium channels I could get.
If you haven’t optimized your content for voice content yet, it’s high time you do. Incorporate voice search phrases into the content copy. The phases must have a natural conversational style. They must include relevant keywords as well.
What are you waiting for? Start working on a plan to improve the search ranking of your website. Implement these tips and you will be surprised by the results.