As SEO strategies evolve and advance, the more highly targeted your online marketing activity can be. In order to stay ahead, here are five ways you can improve your search engine strategy now.
1. Optimise your website
Your first priority is to check your page load speeds on both desktop and mobile using Page Speed Insights. Statistics say that website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.4% with each additional second of load time.
Responsiveness and UX (user experience) also play a crucial role in determining how long someone spends on your website. It's not rocket science ... if your website is fully responsive, easy to navigate and has well laid out, high quality, relevant content, it stands to reason that the more likely you are to attract and, more importantly, retain visitors to your site, as well as ranking on page results.
Key Tips
- • Ensure that your website has no unnecessary code and scripts
- • Replace confused or cluttered designs with clean, web optimised images
- • Use content layouts that make your web page easily and quickly scannable
2. Target Accurate Keywords
Make sure you do your keyword research as this provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching for on Google. There is a plethora of tools out there to help you, but Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner and Google Analytics is a great place to start.
3. Create Better Content
Content is King on any online page. People may visit your website because they are attracted to a headline, but it's the quality of the content that persuades them to stay. Effective content is relevant, easy to read, engaging and uses language that is clear, concise and easy to understand.
Key Tips
- • Divide your content into clear, well sign-posted sections, enabling readers to quickly locate the info they need
- • Consider other forms of content such as video and infographics
- • Revisit your existing content regularly to see whether it could be better presented and updated
4. Track Your Website Traffic
There are many tracking tools available, but Google Analytics is a great starting point, providing a huge amount of information including tracking a customer's journey through your site and also allowing you to view the keywords that your site's pages rank for.
5. Improve Your Link Building
A backlink is when another website connects to your website. The more backlinks your website has, the higher it will rank on Google. However, a word of warning ...due to the huge amount of spam on the internet, not all backlinks are ranked equally by Google.
Key Tips
- • Use Ahref's Backlink Checker to check that you are using reputable backlinks
- • Connect pages within your website. These are called internal links and can help boost the SEO of a particular page, if multiple pages on your site are linking to it.
- • Make sure you eliminate all broken links on your site. These are links that are no longer active when you click on them and can return an error message which has a negative impact on user experience and can harm your SEO.
