SEO is complicated and the opportunities for improving how your site ranks with search engines can seem endless. But you don’t have to know everything about SEO to get the benefits from it. Just managing the basics can boost your web presence and make a big difference in how customers find your site.
Here are a few of the most important, and simplest, things you can do today to improve your SEO.
Get Search Console
You don’t need to be a web developer to see and understand the backend of your site. Google and Bing have created user-friendly webmaster tools to make it easier to monitor and review your site’s performance.
Register with Google Search Console, as soon as you set up your website. It will get information about your site’s health and speed, any crawl errors Google finds and lots more.
Check your speed
How fast does your site load? Speed is a factor in the Google search algorithm. Run your website through Pingdom’s Speed test tool. Don’t forget to occasionally test your site on a desktop, mobile device, and tablet. Your web developer should be able to give you recommendations for improving the site’s speed and performance, depending on your platform and content. Retest the site after changes have been made and keep track over time.
Choose Keywords
This is not as complicated as it may seem. There is no need for extensive research or longtail keyword knowledge. Just get inside the mindset of your potential customer. What words and phrases do they use to describe your services. Be sure to avoid industry jargon. Create a list of words you think people might use to find you online.
Use those key phrases when writing content, and be sure they flow naturally. This is good for SEO, but also good for connecting with your customers, by using the words and phrases they use most often.
Create High-Quality Content
As you may notice already, content is the heart of SEO. At the rise of SEO and content marketing, people were creating web pages and blog posts that were bloated with unnecessary keywords and almost unreadable to users. Search engines have reacted by changing their algorithms to prioritize sites and content that is user-friendly and features high- value content.
With your keywords as a guide, not as a focus, write the content that your customers need to know.
Increase Shareability
Once you have content that is helpful and insightful, it deserves to be shared. Although Google does not specify how it calculates search rankings, it is thought that there is a positive correlation between the amount of social signals and rankings. Whether or not they have a direct effect on search results, social shareability is still excellent tactic for improving brand awareness and driving organic traffic, which help support SEO efforts.
Add social sharing buttons to any content on your site, especially blog posts.
Use more images
Beautiful visual content improves any user experience and makes content more likely to be shared. At the very least, take the extra time to find and use the best images for your content.
To further maximize the powerful effect of images for SEO, make a few simple changes to the image’s file name, alt tags and descriptions using the keywords you’ve chosen.
Test your headlines
Catchy headlines are one of the elements that can stop a reader while they’re scrolling and get them to pay attention to your content.
Perform an A/B test on your headlines or intro text to see which option gets more attention. Learning from what people respond to can be very helpful for all areas of your business. It can also help you stand out from the crowd, which leads to more clicks, more shares – all factors that are known to boost your site’s overall performance.
These simple steps don’t require much technical knowledge, but can drastically improve your businesses reach and SEO performance.
If you’re interested in learning more about building SEO friendly content or increasing your site’s performance in search results, contact one of our media experts to set up a consultation.
