So, you finally understand why SEO is important and you’re needing to make an immediate impact with your SEO? Follow these seven foundational tips to get your rankings heading in the right direction – quickly.
SEO has long been a critical factor in the success of any company’s digital marketing. Whether it’s small business SEO, or trying to rank a blog for selling CBD oil online. Get it right, and it places you at the top of Google’s organic search listings and the prime real estate that is known as page one.
Not only does this draw in a much broader, organically developed audience. But click after click, your position solidifies, ensuring consistent exposure and growth for your brand.
Get it wrong, and you could languish on the SERP pages that few users ever visit.
Although developing a robust and fully formed approach to SEO takes time and effort, there exist several necessary steps you can implement now. Some are easier than others but do them well, and all will have an immediate impact on your SEO.
There’s no secret formula for our first tip.
Simply put, user love valuable, relevant content. And if you want to be found by people using search engines, create content that appeals to the person searching, not the search engine.
The approach to this is two-fold. First, whatever you produce – blog post, ebook, guide, info-graphic, video – make it unique and useful to your niche. Do you manage a travel blog? Separate yourself from the crowd by producing pieces on topics others have yet to cover (or at least, cover en masse).
And don’t be afraid to repurpose old content for a new crowd, if it’s still relevant.
Next, make sure you gear your creations towards who is physically reading it and targeting featured snippets that are relevant to your industry. Sure, employ the underutilized technique of long-tail keywords, but more importantly, make it accessible to those consuming your content. The more popular it becomes, your search ranking will naturally improve.
In the era of “not a lot of patience”, it is essential to have a fast website. Consider Google as you would any other business. Their primary goal is providing customers the best possible experience. To achieve that objective means identifying and recommending websites that meet the highest standards of both content and functionality, including their load times.
Aside from Google search, quick-loading pages translate to more visitors staying on your site as well as making a return visit.
In other words, make your website fast.
Nix anything that slows it down, and keep your platform’s software up to date. Optimize and compress images, HTML, JavaScript's, and CSS. If you employ plug-ins, get rid of those that are rarely used or outdated.
Make sure your optimize speed not only for your desktop pages but also mobile, which brings us to our next tip.
The transition to mobile is moving at hyperspeed. If your website fails to move with it, forget any hope of it ranking high in Google’s SERP.
Just how important is this?
Earlier this year, Google went to mobile-first indexing, where indexing and ranking of sites is now based on the mobile version of a web page, instead of the desktop version. It also helps that worldwide, by the year 2025, 3.7 billion will only use their smartphone to access the internet.
So yes, mobile isn’t just important, it’s necessary.
Test your site to make sure it’s mobile-friendly. Optimize content so fonts are easily read on any device, pages automatically resize to fit any screen, and navigation and content are simple to use and view regardless of how a user accesses it.
Links are a vital cog in SEO.
Whether they are:
– links play a critical in Google’s ranking.
Google uses inbound – also called backlinks – as a form of digital connect the dots. Should a well-regarded, highly authoritative site link back to yours, Google views yours as a site worth checking out.
Along similar lines, linking out to authoritative sites within your own content, elevate you as an equally worthy resource.
With internal links, they help form a connective tissue between pages on your website. Produce an excellent piece of content and provide relevant links from that page to others on your site; it makes all of your content more discoverable and increases your site’s usefulness.
Remember those bots we told you not to target specifically with your content? Well, when it comes to them actually finding your site, it does help to show them the way.
First, make sure your URLs are easy to identify and present a clear idea of the page content.
For example, this:
https://www.myawesomewebsite.com/what-they-are-searching-for/
is better than this:
https://www.myawesomewebsite.com/article/528491
Descriptive URLs also make pages user-friendly for visitors of the non-bot variety.
To provide even more guidance, you should also create a sitemap so a search engine can better deduce the overall content of your site.
Although outward content and optimization are critical factors for SEO, so to is the technical side of your website. This includes the most basic tenets of sound SEO practices, including:
Short title tags containing a primary keyword that are also easily identifiable
H1 tags with primary keywords which clearly identify the context of a page and establish content hierarchy, along with H2 and H3 tags
Engaging meta descriptions – for users and search engines – that are equal parts short (roughly between 50 and 160 characters), engrossing, and contain critical keywords and relevance for each page.
Should it be a factor, particularly in local search, use schema markup to provide Google even more context about your site or your business. You can get help at Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
Technical SEO gets at the heart of minor changes equaling major results, so don’t overlook them.
Even if you’re an introvert, make sure your site isn’t.
Although social signals are not a direct ranking factor for SEO, the likes and shares and Tweets and Instas of social media still matter – a lot. Aside from establishing your own social media profiles for your blog, brand, or business, optimize your site for social success.
And, just a reminder, produce content that’s worthy of being shared in the first place.
Of course, whether you or an outside SEO agency is doing the job, overall SEO requires a long term commitment and plenty of patience. However, these seven steps represent the core foundation of a successful, sustained approach to SEO. Master these fundamentals first – with an Outsourced SEO company or without an SEO company – and your efforts will be rewarded with a rapid rise in the rankings.