SEO Help to Make Your Site Standout
When done right, digital marketing can position your brand in front of customers and expand your reach. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a major part of an effective digital marketing strategy. SEO can help your site rank, which means more people will find you organically through the use of search engines. Knowing where to start and understanding how everything works can be challenging, so SEO help is often in high demand.
Check out these 10 tips to easily integrate SEO into your content and start building your ranking.
1. Keep Things Moving
Load time can make or break a site. You can do everything right, but a slow load time will tank your site before a search engine even has a chance to index it. Most users will bail if a site fails to load in a reasonable amount of time, so load time matters. There are a few things you can do to improve your site’s load time.
- Prioritize above-the-fold content
- Optimize images
- Enable compression
2. Figure Out Your Goals
It’s important to define your goals. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can figure out a plan to do just that. While this advice is useful for life in general, it’s also a good approach for your site. Do you want to rank for a specific keyword? Lower your bounce rate? Or something else?
Your goals should be achievable and realistic. Setting lofty goals may be causing unintentional self-sabotage because you can never find success, let alone build on it. A solution could be to set a series of goals, which you can work through. Instead of deciding you want to submit a mountain, break it apart into small, more feasible goals and before you know it, you’ll reach the high peak.
Research and evaluate your industry and check out what your competitors are doing. It’s not a good idea to mimic what they’re doing, but it’s helpful to understand what’s expected in the industry. Once you have a handle on a goal you can realistically reach, you can create a plan.
3. Identify Keywords
Search engines look for keywords or keyword phrases to help users find relevant sites. Including these terms throughout your text helps search engines identify your site as useful and a good match for users.
This seems easy enough, but figuring out the right keywords and phrases takes some work and time. You want to identify basic keywords for your industry and niche, so you’re showing up alongside your competitors. You also want to stand out and show up in relevant searches that may not include the competition. Finding the right keywords is just the first part. Once you have those keywords you need to use them.
4. Know Your Audience
Content that pulls in readers will help your standing with search engines while also demonstrating to readers that you are an industry leader. Engaging content will make readers hang around longer and search engines will take notice.
5. Use the Proper Formatting
Content should be formatted for the medium it will be distributed on. An article published in an online third-party magazine is formatted differently than a blog post on your site or a newsletter.
Digital content should be broken into easy-to-read sections. Write in an inverted pyramid and use headings, subheadings, and bullet points so readers can easily skim the article. Feature infographics and images that explain key points. You put a lot of work into creating content, so it’s a bummer that everyone won’t read it in its entirety and really spend time with it, but that’s how it is.
It also seems counterintuitive to create skimmable text if the goal is to get people to stay, but the goal is to prevent visitors from leaving right away. Keep people engaged for as long as possible by creating meaningful content that is conducive to scrolling and skimming.
6. Up Your Link Game
Links help your site and are often thought of as a major way to provide SEO help. Whether you are linking out to other sites or scoring some quality backlinks, your SEO can benefit from link building. Links essentially provide additional useful information for your visitors while illustrating to search engines that your site has value. How you use links matters, as well as the sites you link to.
7. Craft a Quality URL
URL is short for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s a web address. Each page of your site has a unique URL. You want to give pages short and succinct names because this creates a streamlined and clean looking URL.
The last part of the URL is known as the file path or slug. Take some time to create a quality slug. The slug should be brief and feature keywords for that particular page. This is advantageous because it clues readers into what each page is about. Clean slugs also make your site look legit and trustworthy. Which is better, ‘/SEO-help’ or ‘?p=5708309’?
8. Create Strong Visuals
Photos, graphics, and videos are a great way to break up blocks of text and add visual interest. Some people also need to see information in order to process it, so including high-quality images will help drive home key points.
The first priority when using any type of visual aid is to make sure it looks good. Visual media should be high resolution and sized to display well on both phone screens and full-size monitors. It’s not visible, but populate the alt tags of all media files with relevant keywords.
Go Beyond Photos
Infographics, like charts and tables or even illustrations that show a process are incredibly valuable imagery. These types of graphics are a great way to explain complicated matters or just to reinforce a point. I already discussed how readers often skim text (so thank you if you’ve stuck with me this long), but this means readers may fail to glean major takeaways.
Pulling a quote from your text and adding it to a graphic is a great way to help ensure your readers pick up the major points. It can be redundant for anyone who reads the text, but it helps make the point clear for any skimmers.
9. Reinvent Existing Content
Find a way to make readers interested in some of your existing content. There are a couple of ways you can breathe new life into old content.
Review and edit old posts. Remove anything that is no longer relevant, add new info, and add links and new images as appropriate. Maintain the keywords when editing an existing post. You still want this page to rank for the same keywords, you just want to improve the ranking. Reviewing the analytics can help you understand what is causing this page to fall short, so you can then address any issues.
Another tactic is to write a new post, but link back to an older post. If while re-visiting an old post you realize you have enough to say that you could just create something new, then create something new. Make sure to mention that you’ve already covered this topic, but you want to revisit it and provide more information. Link back to the initial post. This is a great way to nudge some traffic towards your evergreen pages.
10. Call in SEO Help
Sometimes if you’re caught up in the middle of something you’re unable to see things objectively. Bringing in a fresh set of eyes to review your site can give you a new perspective and provide some much needed SEO help. Bringing in a dedicated SEO pro also frees you up to focus on the other parts of your business. Maintaining a website is a lot of work, and if you’re not familiar with SEO trends and techniques, trying to get up to speed can be frustrating and pull you away from other tasks that require your attention.
I can review your site and put together a plan outlining how to improve your site’s SEO. From identifying keywords, updating meta fields, and creating new content with a singular focus on helping your site dominate.
Need SEO help or want to learn more? Get in touch.
