SEO lies at the heart of every successful online marketing strategy. It is a constantly growing and evolving field, with more and more businesses now trying to take the top position in SERPs. In fact, more than half of the marketers asked in a survey by Marketing Charts admitted an increase in their SEO budgets since 2016.
Since more and more of your prospects are using search engines like Google and Bing to find products and services, it is essential to invest in SEO and improve your visibility on the web. But what can you do to stand out in a world where every online business eats and breathe SEO?
How can you convince the consumers that you are better than your competitors in a field where everybody looks the same?
Well, fret not! Your search results can get more productive with a few tactics that are often ignored by marketers. In this blog, we will explore the often-overlooked changes that you can make to optimize your site and drive valuable traffic over time.
1. Master your on-page SEO
If you want to appear in search results, you need to craft content that deserves to be ranked. Every day, millions of users search for keywords or phrases, and Google rewards web pages that deliver content relevant to those search phrases. So, if you want to rank for a keyword, try to provide valuable content for the specific topic.
In the following section, we outline some useful on-page SEO strategies that will help you improve your search relevancy.
Optimize your content with relevant keywords:
The first step requires you to conduct research for keywords that you can use in your content. When performing keyword research, consider two things:
- Search volume: Search volume tells you how many people are actually using the specific term when searching for your product or service. There are various tools that can help you determine the search volume for a keyword. A good idea is to start with Google’s own Keyword Planner.
This is a highly crucial step because a slight variation in the wording can have a massive impact on traffic. For instance, the phrase “Orlando SEO consultants” may receive hundreds of searches each day, while the phrase “SEO consultants in Orlando” may receive only a few searches each day.
- Competition: Another important thing to consider in keyword research is the competitiveness of the search term. Ranking for a specific keyword will highly depend on the number of websites that offer content relevant to the keyword. The best practice is to choose the most relevant keyword with high search volume and low competition.
After choosing the right keywords, make sure to use them in your content. Try to incorporate one or two keywords per page and make sure they sound natural to the reader.
Optimize your home and service pages
Your home page is the best place to rank for highly competitive keywords. It is the page that will receive the most traffic on your site, so make sure that search engines find it as the most credible page on your website.
You will also want your service page to appear in SERPs for keywords relevant to your niche. It is because most people searching for a firm or business tend to search a specific service online. For instance, a user looking for a good SEO consultant may just type broader terms like SEO services or digital services in search engines. In such instances, your service page needs to be optimized to appear in the search results.
Structure your website
Your website structure is equally important for it to be found in search results. Index all the pages and properly structure them so that both humans and search engine algorithms can properly understand them.
A good practice is to make an XML sitemap that lists the location of each page on the site. It will keep your website clean and make it easier for users and algorithms to navigate your site.
2. Improve your off-page SEO
For your SEO practices to stand out, you must excel in off-page SEO to make your website appear credible and trustworthy compared to other similar sites. To make this happen, you need backlinks from other high-quality sites.
Backlinks act as votes that tell search engines that your site is a relevant, useful, and credible place for searchers to find information about their query.
Ahrefs’ study of over one billion web pages revealed that among the pages that got zero traffic from Google, 66.31 percent had no backlink. The study also found that the more referring domains a page have, the more organic traffic it received from Google.
Getting a site to link to your page can be quite challenging, but here are a few tips that can help you do it.
- Start a blog and promote quality content on your site
- Leverage social media
- Reach out to influencers
- Write guest blogs that contain links to your website
- Constantly monitor your Google Analytics data
3. Invest in the right SEO tools:
SEO can be a challenging and time-consuming task. There is so much statistic involved in the process that if you try to do it manually, you will get lost in the numbers without generating any positive results. Hence, you need to invest in the SEO tools that simplify and automate the process for you. Some of the tools will cost you money, but they will pay a good dividend in the long run.
Use the free Google Webmaster tools to begin your SEO practice. It is a useful tool that can provide you valuable information about your website. Google Analytics is another tool that you can use to analyze your audience, learn about customers’ behavior, age, gender, demography, buying patterns, and much more.
If you want a tool for keyword research, link building, competitor analysis, or social media monitoring, SEMrush should be your choice. It is a paid tool that can help you with much of your search engine optimization and more. There are numerous SEO tools out there, but these will help you know whether your SEO tactics are making a difference.
Final words
SEO forms the base of every successful digital marketing campaign. But the competition in the digital space is getting so fierce now that it is becoming harder and harder for businesses to stand out in SERPs.
By implementing these guidelines, you will start your SEO off on the right foot and reap the benefits of increased organic traffic through search engines.
