Whether your business website is brand-new or a few years old, it’s always the right time to check your website SEO and make sure everything is in order. Staying on top of your SEO allows your website to enjoy better visibility, higher rankings, and greater chances of attracting the right traffic.
If you feel like your website could use an SEO overhaul, it’s best to get professional web SEO services onboard. Even if you find that you can take most of these measures yourself, an extra set of eyes for your SEO audits can’t hurt.
Having said that, let’s get started:
1. Begin with an Analysis
You can’t improve things if you don’t know what to improve. It’s why the logical first step in fine-tuning your SEO is to analyze your website’s data. Google Search Console provides a lot of helpful traffic data that you can use—such as total sessions, unique sessions, and bounce rate.
Pay attention to the data to figure out what’s working in your favor and what isn’t. Which webpages are getting more traffic than others? Where’s your traffic coming from? Which traffic sources need more optimization?
You can also consult user behavior reports to find out how your website’s visitors are spending their time on your site.
2. Nail Your Keyword Research
Keywords give you something to focus your SEO efforts on. Getting your keyword research right is important for ranking and relevance—and it helps the right audience find your small business. Keyword stuffing is a faux pas, so forget about using every keyword out there and hoping for positive results.
Instead, your keyword research needs to identify the most pertinent keywords to your business and target audience. Ubersuggest is a terrific (and free!) tool that you can use to find the right keywords for your niche.
Remember to connect your selected keywords to your customers’ intent—think about why and how they’d use a keyword. This will enable you to give them the answers they need.
3. All About the Content
Content is the fuel that keeps a good SEO strategy going. If you’re neglecting this crucial aspect of your website SEO, you’ll likely see low rankings as a result.
All content that goes on your website needs to be:
- Well-written
- Informative
- High on value and low on “fluff”
Cramming your website with filler content is useless. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Aim to help your potential customers and audience with answers, advice, and information that they can use.
Also, don’t forget to add keywords to your content without forcing them.
4. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is perhaps the biggest part of website SEO. Also called on-site SEO, it includes all the elements that you see (and some that you don’t see) on your website. Content falls in the on-page SEO category, but there are other components too, including:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Headlines
- Header tags
- Image optimization
Ensuring that all of these components are in order—and correctly feature keywords—can do wonders for your SEO.
5. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO includes all your SEO activities that take place on other sites. It leverages third-party websites to improve your rankings. Some off-page SEO techniques are:
- Guest posting (also called guest blogging)
- Social media posts, campaigns, and activities
- Influencer marketing
- Backlinking
Guest posting is when you write posts for high-authority websites in your niche. In addition to building your brand awareness, it also boosts your credibility as a trusted authority in your field.
Backlinking involves placing links to your website on other websites. The idea is that when high-quality websites link to your business website, the latter becomes more credible by association. By that same rule, a lot of poor-quality links or backlinks from low-authority websites can reduce your authority.
6. Mobile Optimization
Google formally implemented its mobile-first index a few years ago. Since then, the search engine rewards mobile-friendly websites to higher rankings in search results. Conversely, it also chastises websites that aren’t mobile-friendly by giving them low rankings in search engine result pages (SERPs).
This makes mobile optimization a can’t-miss aspect of website SEO. If your website isn’t built with mobile devices in mind, it’ll provide a poor user experience and fail to make the right impression.
It’s also bad from a business perspective. The bulk of your potential customers won’t be visiting your website from their computers, but from their phones. Don’t force them to leave you for your competitors because of a clunky, hard-to-use website.
7. The Need for Speed
Your website’s loading speed is, quite literally, not a game. First, your website has seconds to grab your visitors’ attention. Nobody waits around for a website to load if it’s taking too long. Simply put, they don’t have to.
Second, your page speed is a pretty major ranking signal for Google. Meaning, which means that low speed will drag you down in the search rankings, too.
Lastly, slow speed will also affect your conversions. If your potential customers visit your website but can’t be converted into paying customers, that impact will hit your bottom line.
Conclusion
No SEO strategy can deliver overnight results. If you want to stand out in SERPs, you need patience, fantastic content, and an SEO plan of action that covers all bases. There’s no denying that SEO can be complex, but the advice discussed here will get you to a great start.
To recap:
- Analyze your website and traffic data to identify room for improvement
- Make sure you’re targeting the most relevant keywords
- Create longer content that focuses on providing value
- Fine-tune your on-page SEO as needed (or get web SEO services to do it for you)
- Spend time on your off-page SEO tactics
- Optimize your website for mobile devices
- Verify that your website always loads quickly
Start working on these actionable tips to keep your website SEO in good shape.
Guest article written by: The author is affiliated with Search Berg, an agency with over a decade of experience and expertise in all aspects of digital marketing. He likes to spend his off-time outdoors and is an amateur photographer. For more information, contact Search Berg via its website.