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Optimizing your website’s SEO is powerful for many reasons. Any business can influence its organic (unpaid) search engine visibility based on audience searches and website content.
While SEO may feel complex, you should not ignore it as part of your marketing strategy. With marketing, you put a message out that hopefully reaches your target audience–but you don’t always have visibility into specific interests, the buyer’s journey, or the messaging that will connect in the moment. With SEO, you know you’re getting your message in front of someone who’s actively looking.
Below is a quick list of things you can do to enhance your site’s SEO. Some of these are easily done in-house, while others you’ll want to work with professionals to implement.
Clean Up User Experience
Make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for on your website. Hire a designer to build site navigation and hierarchy. Always create content that’s relevant to your audience and your business. Help your readers know what they can expect to find by using appropriate titles and headers.
Add Hyperlinks
Using hyperlinks not only strengthens your content, but it also improves your SEO. When someone is researching online, he or she doesn’t stop in one place. Provide your reader with helpful next steps by linking internally on your site (hint: this could be a call-to-action to contact you!) and externally to other reputable, supporting sources.
Consider your Title Tag
A title tag is a concise description of a web page’s content, and it appears directly in most search engine results. Your title tag should be both meaningful to end users and SEO friendly so that it’s clear to everyone what content is found on that page.
Pay Attention to Heading Tags
Use properly tagged headers (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>…) to direct readers and break up your page content. You should have just one <h1> tag, which will likely reflect your page title. And your remaining content will be broken up by <h2> and <h3> tags, similar to an outline of your page content. Headers should always relate to the content they represent; these tags are additional indicators of what your page is about, which are much more meaningful to search engine bots than simple bold text.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool
For insight into your audience’s searches, reference Google’s Keyword Planner. This tells you what keywords your audience is looking for, and why they might come across what you offer. For example, if you run a digital marketing agency, your audience may be searching for “how to set up email marketing campaigns.” Educate yourself on your audience needs to better tailor your content.
Improve Your Website’s Readability
More complex writing does not mean better writing. Get clear on what you want to say so that your site and content are easy to read and understand for both end users and search engine bots that index your site.
Blog on Relevant Topics
Blogs help with SEO because you can routinely add new, valuable content to your website. When used in conjunction with the Keyword Planner, for example, you can blog about topics that your audience wants to find. Bonus tip: use meta descriptions on your blog posts to better explain what they’re about.
Carefully Choose Your URL
Consider SEO implications both while choosing your domain and building out your website. Does it make sense for your business name and/or domain to include keywords that describe your products or services?
“Add-on domains” can also bring visibility to certain pages or sections of your website. When creating add-on domains, consider an exact match domain vs. partial match domain based on your audience and strategy.
And remember that the file path and name for every page of your website will be part of the URL–use it to your advantage. For example, our service page path contains both our brand name and helpful keywords: pixelpeople.com/services/web-design-development/. When adding new pages and posts to your website, this is an easy way to add SEO value, but it’s often overlooked by authors or admins who add the new content.
Use Available WordPress Tools such as Yoast
If you’re a WordPress user, you have access to different tools to advance your website’s SEO. The most popular WordPress SEO plugin is Yoast, but many others also exist.
Add Titles to Your Images
While images provide a nice aesthetic for your visitors, ensure that they also positively contribute to your SEO. “Alt” tags are like titles for your images, they tell search engines what the image relates to, they’re useful for accessibility purposes, and they’ll appear directly on the page, if there’s a problem loading the image file. Always use descriptive and meaningful keywords in your image “alt” tags.
Rather than feel overwhelmed with SEO, view it as an opportunity to create and organize the content that your audience most wants to see. SEO professionals can improve your rankings and tailor the project based on your needs. At PixelPeople, we recommend a monthly SEO check-in to get the most out of your site and ensure you’re up-to-date on best practices.
