You’ve created content to showcase your best ideas. You’ve added the best images to support the material. You’ve shared your work with your clients and followers. But you still aren’t getting the web traffic that you anticipated and rely on to promote your organization. What needs to change? Enter Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use this guide as part of your SEO learning journey!
What is SEO?
Using SEO seems confusing. As we will discover, SEO is a manageable, effective way to help search engines like Google or Bing crawl, index, and understand your website to optimize your search results. Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results.
💡Think of it this way, based on what a user types into a search bar, the most relevant, unpaid results rank higher in the organic search results list so they show on top of the list. This is important because, less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of Google results (Backlinko, 2023).
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines use crawlers (programs that sift through information on the web and index each piece) to help find the best results. While these crawlers are smart and efficient, they need your assistance. Using the right keywords and getting other sites to link to your page can boost your domain authority and overall search result rank. While these steps seem small, they make a huge impact on SEO strategy.
How do I start improving my SEO?
The key to using SEO to your advantage is to make sure your pages are created for your users and not search engines. Though it can be tempting to make content appealing to search engines first and foremost, it won’t help you in the long run. Here are a few more tips to get you started:
Content
Content is king when it comes to your website, it's the reason people are visiting your website, so make sure it is good. Additionally, the writing should center around your customer. Focus on giving them information that is educational and insightful so that you are positioned as a thought leader in your industry. Also continually checking back on the content you've previously created, and maintaining website content by updating it with new information, links, or statistics helps search engines continually review your site and help grow your owned content to best suit your audience.
Keywords
Time to do some research. What is your audience searching to find you? Those are the keywords you need to be featuring in your writing. Make sure the content uses terms your customers are using not industry jargon that won't help your searchability because people aren't searching for it. With so many search results for each word, choosing the right words can help or hinder your efforts to gain SEO results. “Marketing firm Wyoming” will yield different results than “Wyoming marketing firm.”
Research, play, and track keywords to see which performs the best. Also, make sure that your content features titles and headers that are relevant to the content being presented. If you’re using a content management system for your website, take advantage of meta tags, hashtags, alt text, and any other SEO options that are offered. When labeling your content on your website, make the titles precise and unique. This will ensure that your users are more likely to remember what you have shared and enable search engines to better identify the content you're sharing (helping you in your SEO results).
Navigation
Like an outline of a paper, the outline of your website is important because it pinpoints where information is located. Give search engines access to your site map so they can find your content and direct users to your pages. While it is important to make your website unique, it is more important to make it user-friendly. If a user cannot navigate through your website because it does not flow well from one page to the next or the navigation buttons are not clear, the chances of that user recommending your site or visiting again are slim. Periodically check each link on your website to ensure that no links are broken and that all of your pages are found without error. There are many tools including W3 Link Checker and MozBar to help you do this.
Links
Like creating really good content, creating links, both internal and external, should be a priority. Links should be precise, descriptive, and relevant to the content. When users have a basic idea about the content a link houses and that it is relevant to their search, they are more likely to follow through with that action. Also, using anchor text in your content is extremely helpful to search engines if used often. If the anchor text points users to a page from many other pages, then there is a high probability that search engines will rank the anchor text phrase higher.
Images
If your image files are too big or the wrong file type, this can cause your page to load slower. You can resize your image yourself or use an online resource like Adobe or Photoshop to ensure that your photo is the correct size and type for your website and responsive design. Also, when using images as links, include alt text to inform the user what your photo links to should it not load correctly.
Responsive Design
Most people use mobile devices to search for answers online these days. Utilize responsive design to capture these users. If users cannot access the information for your website on their mobile device, they are more likely to find another site with similar information that is mobile-friendly.
In late 2016, Google began experimenting with the use of mobile-first indexing. It is a good idea to make responsive design a priority for your website to thrive in mobile-focused indexing. To ensure that your mobile version can be accessed by Google bots, check out the robots.txt testing tool.
With so many moving parts, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and confused by SEO. However, it is also manageable to develop and implement a strategy to navigate your confusion in this dynamic SEO world. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to start making changes and many free resources are available to extend your SEO knowledge. One thing is certain, to climb the ranks, there is no time like the present.
Ready to ignite your SEO? Contact us at hello@lumstudio.com to get started!