Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the best ways to bring visitors to your website and boost sales in 2020. This is because more than half of trackable website traffic comes from organic search.
But you might be wondering how you are going to stand out from the crowd now that everyone and their grandmothers are optimizing their websites for search.
Unfortunately, Google’s repeated search algorithm updates make it difficult to maintain the best strategy and strategies. And with SEO becoming a standard part of digital marketing strategies for most businesses, competition is fierce.
In this article, we are going to help improve your SEO performance for 2021. You will learn many best practices to design an effective SEO strategy for your business. Use these modern practices to reopen your SEO game and run your business at the top of the search engine results page.
- Look at your targeted keywords
Having a good understanding of your targeted keywords is the right foundation for your SEO campaigns. These keywords are words related to your business. They may include mentioning the terms of your product and services and your brand. If you are still unsure of what to target with your SEO campaigns, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool.
- Create a blog
77% of internet users read website blogs regularly. If you own a business website, then you should think how to start a blog that allows you to connect better with your target audience. Which is not possible with other channels like social media. By providing relevant, fresh and updated content on a blog, you can give your target audience all the information you need about your brand and solve any of their problems.
High quality blog posts are also seen by search engines, especially when they are shared or linked by other people. This can help you reach more people.
- Claim a Featured Snippet Position
If you run a question-based search on Google right now, there is a high probability that the first thing you are looking for is an answer displayed in a box that comes before other search results. You can try it now with “Web Design Topic”. That box and the contents in it are a featured snippet.
A study has shown that landing in a featured snippet position can increase the average click-through rate on a website by more than 100%.
You can use tools like SEMrush to find ranked keywords for those snippets. If you are already in the top five of the search results page for the term, shake your content with the tips above, and your content will become one of the select snippets over time.
- Optimize your title for SEO
Heading in your post is not just for breaking content. If optimized enough they can improve your ranking. How can you customize your titles?
- Post-in-depth content
Long-term posts rank high on Google and for logical reasons. Quality-in-depth pieces typically contain all information on a subject matter or come very close. Therefore, it is not surprising that the top ranked pages on Google for many search terms have an average of 1,890 words. Google likes it when users can get all the answers they need from a single page. Therefore, spend time to create more in-depth content for every page you publish or post.
- Practice Internal Linking
Google understands a website by using bots to analyze the homepage and then slowly visits other links associated with it. Therefore, the homepage shares its link jus with other pages on the website and allows Google to find new pages faster.
This is why you should interlink the posts on your website. Adding a link to an old post to a new post not only helps readers find more content on your site, but also makes it easier for Google to quickly crawl your new content.
- Include Outbound Links
When writing posts, include links to other websites that can improve the reading experience and validate some points you have made. Google likes it when you are linking to high-value resources because it shows that you want to help the reader even further. However, it is important to ensure that you are linking to sites that are relevant to your post. Google penalizes websites that engage in commercial or inorganic link-building.
- Write Meta Description
A meta description is a summary of the content on a page. You can see it below the link to a page in Google search results. Although meta descriptions are not analyzed when calculating a website’s rank, they do affect the website’s click-through rates (CTR). Interestingly, CTR is a ranking factor. You can write your meta description before publishing the post. If your website is WordPress-based, then Yoast SEO does an excellent job of helping you write meta descriptions. If you do not write a description for your post, Google will use the first 150–160 characters as a summary in your article.
- Customize Your Images
Your SEO campaign should not ignore images. Make sure that all your images are properly optimized to reflect the content of the page. This increases image ranking in search and the possibility of bringing more traffic to the post. Google images account for 10% of all Google traffic. It represents a large number of users that you cannot ignore.
- Use Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tailed keywords are search terms that are conversational, but include keywords. For example, “How do I make money online in the UK” is a long-tailed form of the keyword “make money online”.
The main advantage of using long-tail keywords in SEO is that they are not as competitive as short ones. By focusing on them, you can increase the ranking of your posts on Google. Additionally, targeting long-tail keywords allows you to create content that is optimized for voice search. SEMrush is a tool that can help you find these keywords.
- Brand Mention and claim your link
It is a well-known fact that backlinks are an important ranking factor. So what do you do when other people refer to your brand without linking to your website? Access the link and claim it! Link-building is a resource-intensive process.
If you have dozens of websites that have mentioned your brand without giving you a link, then some of your work is done. Reach the brand, and politely ask them to link the mention of the brand. This is a simple yet effective strategy for brands that are already semi-popular on the web.
- Optimize for Mobile
Google likes websites that are optimized for mobile because at any given time half of the users on the web are on mobile. If your website is not mobile-optimized, you are isolating half the web population and eliminating a poor experience for Google users. The search engine giant already operates a mobile-first strategy. Go to the design of your website and make sure that your website is super-fast and responsive on mobile. - Change Your URL Structure
If your blog URL is such that the date of the post is highlighted, then you need to make sure that the URL structure reflects any future updates. This is the only way your updates can be received by Google while the overall content remains relevant.
Some people choose to hide the date of the posts to keep them evergreen. It can be counterproductive for both web users and Google to know if a post is current and relevant. If you have similar positions with a recently published date, they will likely give a higher rank.
- Create Amazing Visual Content
72% of people looking for information about your brand or service would rather watch an explanatory video than read the walls of the text. What does this tell you? Pay more attention to the content, it can be consumed blindly. Apart from videos, you can also create more infographics.
You do not need to find radical content ideas. By converting some of your best content into videos and infographics that can be published on YouTube and other social platforms, you can attract more traffic.
- Build Your Social Signal and Online Brand
Social signals affect search engine rankings in the near and long term. Include social media in your SEO strategies. Generating more and more buzz around your brand, you can get more organic backlinks, improve your CTR and reduce your bounce rates. To get more information about how zytal can optimize your SEO ranking, call us. Our SEO Experts will provide you a FREE consultation about how SEO can help to grow your business online.