Search engine optimization – better known as SEO – is the practice of boosting the quantity and quality of website traffic. Website SEO uses organic search results to increase brand exposure and website traffic. It’s about understanding people and what they are looking for online. Once you know your audience, you can deliver the content they want, which in turn improves engagement. We previously discussed the best strategies to implement during COVID-19 and SEO is one of the most crucial aspects. Let’s discuss why SEO is so important and also learn some top tips that you can apply to your business to list higher in the all-important search engine rankings.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO tools are important because search engines are at the heart of online traffic. While paid advertisements and social media can still be effective, most online traffic comes from search engines.
Search engines cover a lot more digital real estate and find themselves in front of more people. SEO results also get more clicks than paid advertisements. Around 3% of people (2.8%) click on paid ads. SEO offers up to 20 times the amount of traffic as paid advertising. With statistics like these, you simply can’t ignore its importance. If SEO seems too complicated to grasp, consider hiring a business that specializes in SEO.
It’s impossible to talk about SEO without recognizing its longevity. Good quality SEO by a company is evergreen. The content will always be there on your website, continuing to generate traffic for weeks, months, and years. Paid advertisements last only as long as the money does. SEO never goes away.
There are several different kinds of website SEO an SEO company will use for your website. The most common ones are content SEO, image SEO, and off-site SEO. Content SEO is optimized website content like articles and blog posts. Image SEO covers meta-descriptions and names for images on websites. Off-site SEO refers to things off of a website that can affect search engine rankings, such as high-quality backlinks. All of these work together to create a higher ranking.
Website SEO Audits
SEO audits are one of the many ways an SEO company offers SEO tips for a website. This audit looks at how well your site is currently performing so that a company can understand where to go from there. Search engines use a lot of different factors to analyze and rank websites. An SEO company will use an audit to check how your site performs on these factors. It helps to determine problem areas that need to be fixed in order to take your site to the next level. They’ll provide you with a list of everything you can do to improve the SEO of your website following the audit.
This audit covers things like on-site SEO and hyperlinks, the current state of your SEO content, and the backlinks you get from other websites. Backlinks are an essential part of an SEO strategy, but not all links are created equal. It reflects poorly on your site if you are linked to by a questionable source. An audit is useful because the first step to website SEO is understanding your current situation.
Create High-Quality Helpful Content
The most common mistake people make when writing content for website SEO is not paying enough attention to humans. Great quality content is written for humans first and search engine crawlers second. If you focus too much on keywords, you end up with a garbled mess. Instead, build your content strategy around helpful and high-quality content that users enjoy reading.
Make sure that you break your blog posts and articles up with headings and subheadings. These headings create pauses in the content and make it easier for humans and robots alike to process. The heading should offer some information about what the following paragraphs will discuss. People these days rarely read an entire blog post. They tend to focus on the things they think are most relevant to them. Headings stand out from the rest of the content and catch the eye. People may skim the post for a particular heading and read that section.
It’s good to have links to the content on your website, but these link names should be clear and concise. A great example would be “https://yourcompany.com/projects/our-first-project” as the link clearly displays all the information a person could need.
Use Backlinks Effectively
Backlinks are among the most important website SEO tools. Backlinks have been used in marketing and SEO for years. The more links you have to your website, the better your traffic and reputation, not to mention your rank on search engine results pages.
While good quality backlinks are as effective as they’ve ever been, how you develop those backlinks has changed over time. There was a time when you could just get backlinks on any website and have it be enough. These days, however, things are a little trickier.
Links should be generated on websites that not only have high authority themselves but are relevant to the original website. For example, a restaurant should aim to get links from directories and review sites. It wouldn’t be suitable for a company selling skateboards to be connected to a baby products website, even if that website was the most authoritative in its niche. A successful SEO company will incorporate backlink strategies into the overall content marketing strategy.
Another common tactic that no longer works is posting links to your site across blog posts and forums. While this will technically create a link to your website, it’s a weak quality link that search engines will penalize you for having. Get high-quality links from high-quality sources.
Use Keywords
Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO. This is something everyone knows. The problem is that not everyone understands how to use them properly. One of the most important SEO tips for website owners is to make good use of the right keywords.
Keyword spamming – the act of using keywords as much as possible – is looked down on by readers and search engines alike. People can tell when you’re trying to spam as many keywords as possible, and they don’t like it. It’s also bad for search engines because they want to see the proper utilization of keywords. Keywords should be used a handful of times in the text, with a keyword density of around 2-4% at the very most.
Try to focus on unique and long-tail keywords, so you have less competition. Don’t use the same keywords that everyone else is. Try to find something that people are searching for to find you. There are lots of ways to go around finding and creating good long-tail keywords. Google themselves have several SEO tools you can use.
Optimize Your Pages
They call it “search engine optimization” for a reason — you need to optimize everything. Optimizing your pages means finding ways to make your site load quickly and efficiently. Spread out content to make it more readable, so people are less tempted to feel overwhelmed and click off the site.
User engagement is a key aspect of website SEO, and they will leave your site quickly if the experience is not optimized. A high bounce rate can lower result in websites being ranked lower by search engines.
There are lots of things you can do to optimize your content. Compress images so they load faster, consider how items are placed on the page, and include on-site links and navigation when you can. The better optimized your pages are, the more effective they are at capturing leads and converting them into customers. Check the graphic to see more about how to optimize your pages effectively. A perfectly optimized page is one where all these elements are implemented together. Even one poorly optimized aspect can ruin the effectiveness of other aspects.
Summary
What is SEO? It turns out the answer is more complicated than you might expect. SEO is getting your website to load quickly and effectively. It’s getting links to your website so people visit. It’s using keywords properly. At the end of the day, SEO is all about generating organic traffic for your website in an efficient way.