With the abundance of content being uploaded online every day, it is important to increase the visibility and relevance of your pages in search engine results. The use of search engines is the primary source of web traffic for businesses and often complements other channels. Greater SEO than your competitors is going to have a material impact on acquiring customers, especially those searching with the intent to find products and services. Efficient SEO practices and the use of proper SEO tools will improve the usability of a website and user experience ultimately positioning yourself above your competitors.
Setup Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Analytics is a free way to enter all your website data into google. Once you've set up a property and tracking code you can connect google analytics with your e-commerce to track your revenue and transaction data. Previously known as Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a free platform useful to individuals like website owners, developers, and content creators used to understand and enhance website performance. GSC will alert you of any errors while telling Google and other search engines about the organization of your site. Click here for a full walkthrough of Google Search Console.
Be on a paid plan
A free trial is a great way to get comfortable with a platform, however, once the free trial ends all the work you put into crawling and indexing your site will disappear. It’s also important to purchase a custom domain. To succeed in search engines you must build trust with potential customers and be more memorable. To rank higher for related keywords choose a domain name that relates to your industry.
Use The Right Tools
There are many useful SEO tools online to help keep up with algorithm changes, rankings, and competitors. There are many useful paid but also many efficient free tools to help you achieve these search goals.
Paid:
- Ahrefs: an SEO tool for audits, tracking, and more
- Keywords everywhere: Used for conducting keyword research
Free:
- Surfer SEO Chrome Plugin: used for search data and content guidelines
- Keyword.io: used to suggest keywords
- Screaming Frog: Finds crawl errors on websites.
- Moz: A full SEO marketing suite
- MozBar: For on the go SEO research
Keyword search
To achieve the best SEO you must use keywords or words with high “search volume” which is the number of searches a certain word gets in a month. Following keywords research do your best to explore it fully and input the most valuable keywords for your site.Page optimization
Be sure to only use one H1 (Heading 1) tag on your website page. Your H1 should contain your keywords and often be used as the page’s main headline. To optimize your page you should also aim to keep your page titles under 60 characters and input your keywords at the beginning of the page as google currently previews the first 50-60 characters. Your titles should be readable and compelling to the reader.
Meta description
Meta-descriptions are the text under a page title in a search result, so they should clearly and briefly describe what that site page is about. Moz indicates meta descriptions are being cut off around 155-160 characters, so it is best to keep all meta-descriptions under 150 characters and attempt to use keywords at the beginning of the text.ALT Image Text
Alt image text is a description of an image in which improves SEO, but also the accessibility of visually impaired customers. Studies now show over 20% of google searches are done through images, so to rank higher in google search results it is important to add filenames and alt text to website images.Add Schema Markup
One way to increase click-through rates and website traffic try adding schema markup. This will help Google to better understand your website and improve how your site shows up in SERPs.
Improve content
Having useful and meaningful content will make all the difference in the quality and visibility of your website. Make sure to pair your content ideas with terms people are actually searching for and use your keyword research to make your site more visible. This can be done best by brainstorming customer questions and determining what content will answer these questions. Some ways to incorporate relevant content to your website are informational pages, blog posts, product reviews, and links to other channels such as your social media platforms.
Create a link-building strategy
Using links throughout your website will help to direct traffic to the right places and minimize bounce rates. The relevance, number, and quality of links will count toward your overall ranking and create trust amongst users. Once you have gained some traction you can look into using a brand monitoring tool to determine what sites have mentioned your brand without linking it to your site, so you can ask the writer or publication to add a link.
Localize SEO
Make sure to list your business on web directories such as Facebook, google my business, LinkedIn company Direct, and yellow Pages to encourage local customers as your business will be able to be found through maps. It’s important to thoroughly fill out your contact page as google values accurate contact information in their SEO ranking. Another way to encourage local traffic is city-specific landing pages, especially if you have multiple physical locations in different cities.
Check technical aspects
The technical aspects of your website are extremely important in creating trust with your customers and ranking highly in Google searches. Ensure your site is fast and mobile-friendly. You will want your website to be easily readable and up to speed as this will increase user experience. One tip to increasing a site's speed ranking is to use redirections to a relevant page when another is not working. Each page will have a different URL that should be readable, avoid underscores, include target words, and ultimately be readable to humans.
Algorithms are always changing thus SEO can almost always be adjusted to be improved, however small and frequent changes will result in a higher search ranking. All in all, it is important to keep in mind the user experience and how to make the searcher's life easier.
Is your team in need of a greater SEO Strategy for your business? Connect with us today to discuss your options. We'd love to chat!