With the arrival of 2020, the digital landscape as a whole has undergone various changes, leading to a growing demand for advanced digital marketing efforts. Many business owners may choose to concentrate their efforts on paid media tactics such as search engine marketing and social media marketing. However, one of the most effective ways to see business growth is by focusing on SEO. SEO is an incredible set of methods that helps enhance your website’s visibility and ranking on Google Search Results (SERP).
By optimizing your website properly, you can place your website in front of your target audience, which allows you to achieve the kind of long-term results you want. You can learn more about SEO by checking out our blog, What is SEO and Why Is It Important For Your Business? Of course, with all of its wonders, SEO has become a popular term to throw around in today’s digital and marketing spaces. However, it’s extremely crucial to remember that SEO, along with various aspects of marketing, is constantly evolving. With how fast-paced the digital world has become, is it possible to improve your website traffic in this current period? Of course!
Here are 10 important SEO tips you can use to boost your website traffic:
1. Perform keyword research. The first step to a powerful SEO strategy is keyword research. You need to think about the words and phrases you want your website to rank for on search engines. This usually involves creating a SEO keywords list using keyword and SEO planning tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Many of these tools also provide useful information, including the volume of users searching your specific keywords and its level of competition.
When you create your keywords list, consider the following questions:
- What keywords match what you offer as a brand?
- Do these keywords help users find what they’re looking for on your website?
- Will these keywords target your ideal audience?
- Are there any key phrases you can use to make your customer’s search easier?
Enhancing your website traffic should not be your only objective. You should also pay close attention to the type of users that visit your website. According to Hootsuite, “SEO is about getting your content seen by the right people. It’s about making content discoverable so others will find it and share on social organically.” By creating a list of well-researched and relevant keywords, you can ensure that the right visitors are discovering your website.
2. Add internal links on your pages. Internal linking in a website is often ignored by companies, but it’s a surefire way to boost SEO. Through internal links, you can firmly establish your website’s overall infrastructure as well as link value and authority in each page. For instance, when Google crawls your website, the internal links will help the search engine determine the hierarchy of each page, including your blog. This makes it easier for your website to rank as long as the link is relevant to the page or blog post you’re working on.
3. Include external links on your website. External links also play a key role in enhancing website traffic. To obtain external links, you must create quality content like blog posts that cultivate backlinks and relationships between businesses and customers. Search engines like Google depend on external links to review the value of your website. Apart from helping with website traffic, link building also enhances your content’s credibility which in turn helps increase customer loyalty and trust.
4. Create meta descriptions for every page. Meta descriptions are tags that contain keywords or phrases that describe a page and its content. These tags help rank your website’s relevancy on search engines, allowing users to connect your website with the information they’re searching for. It’s highly recommended that each meta tag and description is appropriate so that it fits the page it’s describing. Make your meta descriptions short and informative while hitting key points in the page’s content. Along with specific meta descriptions, make sure to create URLs that are simple to understand and read. This makes it easier for both your users and search engines to find each page on your website.
5. Pay close attention to your website’s load time. No one likes waiting for a website to load. In fact, according to eConsultancy, as many as 40 percent of online users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore, it’s a high priority to remove any issues that result in a lengthy load time for your website. Your page load time should not exceed more than 2 seconds. If you aren’t sure what’s causing your website to load slowly, try checking the amount of ads, links, and high-resolution items you have in each page. You may find it challenging to find the balance between the materials you want on your website and what’s needed to maintain a faster load-time. In the end, you will need to put your customer experience first if you want your site to be effective.
6. Share content on social media. If you don’t already have social media pages created for your business, what are you waiting for? Social media and SEO often go hand-in-hand in attracting new audiences. Social shares across prominent social platforms like Instagram and Facebook can easily entice both current and potential customers to your website’s content. Of course, the content you publish on social media channels must be interesting enough to entice your audience into sharing. You can also make it easier for customers to share your blog posts by including a share option underneath the article that does so. If you’d like to learn how social media helps increase brand awareness, be sure to read our blog, 5 Ways to Use Social Media for Brand Awareness.
7. Implement the right keywords in images. Did you know that the images on your website also need descriptions? Alternative text (mostly known as alt text) are words and phrases that can be used to tell search engines and website visitors what the content of an image is. When uploading images to a page, make sure to include an alt text about what the image contains. This is also a great way to incorporate more keywords that match the image and your website or business as a whole. Alt text makes it easier for users and search engines to find your website.
8. Create engaging content on a regular basis. The quality of your website content is important, but so is consistency. You must create relevant content that keeps your customers interested in what you have to offer. Consistent, accurate, and relevant content will keep your audience coming back for more while also building credibility. Publishing high-quality content is a crucial component to showing your customers that your company is a leader in your industry. As more visitors consume your articles, Google will reward you by increasing your rankings on search engine results.
9. Optimize your website’s anchor text. Anchor text refers to clickable words that link from one webpage to another. Your anchor text helps to influence your website’s SEO by allowing search engines to evaluate the page you’re linking to. It also allows them to review your website’s content relevance to search items. That’s why your anchor text, along with internal and external links, should be valuable to your site’s readers. To optimize your website’s anchor text, use a mix of branded (your brand name with a link placed on it), exact-match keywords (keywords with a link on it), and partial-match keywords (keywords plus some other text with a link on it).
10. Make sure your website is mobile friendly. For a few years now, Google has been developing an algorithm called Mobile First, which allows search engines to crawl a website through a smartphone. Starting in September 2020, Google will be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites. As such, you must ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, especially since mobile-first indexing is no longer solely to enhance your user’s experience—it will also directly affect your website’s ranking.
For many businesses around the world, SEO has become an integral aspect of marketing strategies in 2020. In fact, 61% of marketers “say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority” this year, according to Impact. Since SEO evolves along with digital marketing, it can be tricky to master it all at once while staying updated on the latest trends. The main goal of SEO is to create a memorable online experience for your visitors so that it cultivates strong relationships. It may take time and research before you can see any significant results, but your hard work will pay off in the long run.