Standing out from the crowd can be difficult, especially when it comes to SEO rankings in a hyper-competitive market like the USA. Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of 10 tips that will make sure you reach the top of Google’s search results page.
The 10 Top SEO Tips That Will Get Your Business Found
Optimize Your Website
The first thing customers see when landing on your website is how long it takes to load.
This makes your site’s performance a crucial factor when it comes to SEO.
Having a slow-loading page can kill a business in today’s marketplace.
Research shows that a single second delay in page load time can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
This proved to be such an important influence on SEO performance that Google included site speed as one of the top factors when it comes to ranking.
First, remove all the non-essential elements that may be bogging down your loading speed.
Also, it’s recommended you declutter your website by updating or removing all the outdated and unnecessary pages and the links leading to them.
Prepare the Groundwork With Web Analytics
If your goal is to achieve high search rankings in the long term, you will need to develop a solid SEO strategy. And you won’t be able to do that unless you’ve done your homework and collected all the relevant data on your website’s Google search performance.
You can get all this data using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or any of the third-party web analytics solutions.
These tools will let you key in on the parts of your website that attract the greatest number of visitors.
They will also help you identify the areas where you might need to boost performance.
Research the Competition
When looking to increase your performance it would also be good to turn to your competitors.
Tools like Competitive Link Finder or Majestic SEO will let you search and cross-reference links on up to four competitor sites.
This can give you a clue as to what your competitors are doing to attract and convert visitors and can inform your own SEO strategy.
Social media could be another useful source of information about your competitors.
Another Moz tool, Followerwonk, allows you to compare your Twitter account with that of your competitors.
You can use it to scan for mutual followers and seek out trends or products they are interested in.
Write Quality Content With Customers in Mind
The old methods of SEO seem to be having a bit of a resurgence lately. These mostly include using keywords to drive search results as opposed to focusing on writing high-quality content. And if you’re looking to achieve long-term SEO success, this is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
If your website doesn’t already have a blog segment, you should definitely consider creating one.
Writing high-quality content with topics relevant to your visitors is much more likely to increase your search engine ranking.
Also, by offering valuable content, you are showing your customers your company is an expert in its area of work.
This will have a significant effect when it comes to sales conversions and customer retention.
Right Keywords in the Right Places
While writing your blog content, you might be tempted to use every keyword you can think of and try to include as many as you can in your post.
This is a surefire way to flagged and penalized by the Google algorithm, and will only serve to make your SEO ranking plummet.
It’s far better to focus on a limited number of high-quality keywords and make sure you place them properly throughout your blog post.
A good rule of thumb when picking keywords is to make sure they are specific enough to draw in searches.
For instance, if you’re writing a post about your restaurant, instead of using a generic keyword like ‘best restaurant’, you can add the type of food you prepare and your location.
Using Keyword Research tools can make this process even easier, as it will show you an estimate of how many people are searching for the keyword you plan on using.
Once you’ve identified the most effective keywords to use you need to make sure you position them so they can drive the search results towards your blog.
For example, writing a catchy page title with the keyword included can encourage readers to click on it. Also, including keywords in the headers of the post will further strengthen your ranking.
Pay Attention to Meta Descriptions
‘Meta description’ refers to the small snippet of text describing your page.
You can find it under the page link when searching on Google.
An often overlooked part of SEO, you can use the meta description to your advantage. Try to use the two lines available to concisely sum up the gist of your post. Also, make sure you include the most important keywords here.
While on the topic of meta descriptions, make sure you add an alt tag to every image you use on your page. Quality alt tags can be used to further explain the content of the image or relate a call to action.
This is also an ideal place to include relevant keywords, as all these are used by Google to determine your search result ranking.
Build Quality External Links…
Using links to other relevant content pages on your website might seem strange at first glance. After all, it does look like you’re simply providing traffic for your competitors.
However, link building remains the foundation of a good SEO strategy.
In truth, linking to other sites has two distinct advantages. First, by linking to reliable sources and quoting credible information, you greatly increase the chance your readers will see your website as a trustworthy source of quality content.
Second, if you intend to get backlinks from highly respected websites, you must be willing to give first.
This brings us to arguably the most critical factor when it comes to your SEO performance – getting external backlinks. This refers to links on other websites bringing visitors to your page. They will make sure you are close to the top of Google search results.
You can use tools like Ahrefs to see how many sites are linking back to your domain. It will show you whether or not those sites are considered authoritative.
Please note that it isn’t enough to just get a large number of links to your site. These links must come from other sites that hold a high degree of respect in their field.
This also means that using bots to get a large number of backlinks will only serve to decrease your ranking. In fact, getting backlinks from sketchy or spammy sites is an easy way to get flagged by Google’s ranking algorithm.
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…But Don’t Forget Internal Links
While building external backlinks, many people tend to overlook the importance of internal links.
An easy way to boost your SEO performance, internal backlinks refer to links leading to pages on your own website.
An easy way to look at this is by using the topic cluster model:
The three main elements considered here are pillar content, cluster content, and hyperlinks.
Pillar content or pillar pages are usually the main pages of your website. They cover general topics, like the nature of your company or contact information, in a comprehensive and easily accessible way.
Cluster content, on the other hand, includes the pages containing subtopics related to the pillar pages.
Using hyperlinks to connect your blog posts to your website’s pillar pages and cluster content is a great way to increase visitor retention. Essentially, you are providing potential customers with further reading and encouraging them to stay on your website.
Optimize Your URLs
Every URL on your website should be readable and meaningful, whether it leads to one of your pillar pages, as mentioned above, or to a post in your blog section.
What we mean by readable and meaningful is that instead of looking like this:
https://www.mywebsite.com/blog/272531
…your links should look like this:
Even though the link below is longer, it’s far easier to understand and offers a quick look at the page it leads to.
A solid method is to use anywhere between 2-5 words connected by hyphens. Optimizing your URLs will make sure Google has an easier time reading and ranking your pages.
This will, in turn, increases your SEO ranking.
Use Social Media to Your Advantage
Even though Google hasn’t officially added social media statistics as a factor when ranking pages, social signals still offer a way to quickly boost your SEO performance. Social shares, such as likes, tweets, or pins, can increase your search engine rankings by appealing directly to potential visitors.
As we already mentioned, first you start writing high-quality content for people to share. After that, make sure you add share buttons to your blog posts in a way that will make them visible and easy to use.
Also, consider using calls to action within the blog posts themselves encouraging visitors to share your content.
Conclusion
To get the results in the long run, make these 10 tips a regular habit. Constantly keep your website performance at a top-level, provide high-quality and relevant content with effective keywords, and build backlinks both within your website and with other sites in the field.
Doing this is sure to drive organic traffic, grow your revenue and attract and retain new customers.
However, nothing beats hiring the best SEO company in united states and letting them do what they are best at professionally.