Unlock The Key To SEO Success With This Practical Guide
Everyone knows what SEO is all about and the benefits that come with it. However, only a few individuals know how to navigate SEO in the direction of success. By the definition of success, SEO helps businesses achieve better visibility, rankings, and targeted traffic on their website. SEO is the organic, internet marketing that can help a business achieve the mentioned benefits. An SEO company in India can help businesses market themselves or they can set up their in-house SEO department. Either way, SEO works.
This blog will serve as a guide to optimize your SEO strategy. So, if you’re a business wanting to integrate or better its SEO strategy or you are simply a student learning about SEO, then this will prove to be the perfect read for you.
The Steps You Can Take For An Optimized SEO Strategy
An effective SEO allows businesses to appear in specific searches associated with their domain. Whenever an individual conducts an online search, the business starts appearing in search results, if relevant. This is only possible with the correct placement of the SEO strategy. Sometimes if a digital marketing agency cannot do these tasks themselves for businesses they outsource it to a premium SEO Reseller. Either way, SEO is essential for businesses and they should get it done whether themselves or from a digital marketing agency.
With this, some of the tips you can follow to execute excellent SEO are:
1. Quality Content
Any SEO success starts with high-quality content. A website needs to have premium, user intent content to rank well. Any website providing value to the user and promoting their services, or products with legal, or logical web methods, gets all the search benefits from Google.
Original, fresh content is the need of the hour, and Google promotes websites with this trait. Duplicate content is often penalized and great content consists of various subheadings where the content gets divided.
Also, the content should meet Google’s EAT criteria that include: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The search engine rewards websites meeting all these crucial factors.
2. Niche-Specific Keywords
Content should always include target keywords. Keywords are search terms or phrases that a person enters while searching. The more relevant, and targeted keywords are for a business, the more the traffic gets generated on a website.
With the correct keywords, targeted leads and traffic gets navigated, thus, increasing sales and revenue. Not just primary keywords, but secondary keywords or LSI should be included as it allows a website to cater to a wider audience. Secondary keywords are terms related to the primary keywords. Including both of these terms in content can certainly allow Google to push the rankings of your web pages for better rankings. Including keywords, therefore, leads to increased visibility which translates to increased website authority and traffic. In fact not just the content but various sections of the website should contain domain specific keywords.
One can use keyword research tools such as SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner to select appropriate keywords.
3. On-Page SEO
It’s okay if the content is informative, however, it’s of no use if it’s not optimized for the search engines. That’s where On-Page SEO comes in place. Implementing On-Page SEO optimization should involve:
- Content that’s well structured and easy to read.
- The content should include primary and 3-4 secondary keywords.
- The title tag, H1, and meta description should include the primary keyword.
- The primary keyword should also be part of the URL.
- One image with alt text, image name including the keyword.
- Links play a vital part in On-Page SEO. The content should include internal and external links alongside anchor texts that allow a user to conveniently navigate the content. This increases page user experience and thus boosts SEO.
4. Easy Crawling
If Google can’t access your website, all your efforts are a waste. Crawling ensures that search engines can easily find a website on the world wide web. It is the process through which Google finds a new website. Google Search Console shows how many pages are crawled for a website.
A site’s structure or design should be well in place to be crawled by the search bots, spiders, or crawlers of Google. Giving access to Google bots is, therefore, necessary. A robots.txt file in the website’s root directory can help manage crawling instructions for the Google bot. As a matter of fact, Google Search Console can itself help a website generate a robots.txt file.
5. Potent Backlinks
What other websites in your niche think about you also tells a lot about your business to Google. For example, having backlinks on other high DA websites indicates a ton to Google about your business. Backlinks are simply, links that link back to your website. This indicates to Google that not just the business themselves but even other businesses or websites think positively about your business. No business is naive to link back to a business until they’ve done or achieved something worthy.
These backlinks, especially from high authority websites increase your rankings naturally since it exhibits your dominance or authority in the market.
Therefore, creating and sharing useful content is the key. Infographics submission, press release, guest posts, are some of the ways to gain high-quality backlinks that boost your authority in no time.
6. Schema Markup
Schema Markup indicates to Google how the page should be interpreted and classified. It tells Google the contents of the page that whether it’s a tutorial or a chapter. Hence, these structures should be location-specific, complete, and relevant.
Schema.org provides an easy way to create such structured data. You can visit the website to create and understand more about schema markup.
7. Mobile- Friendliness
You should know that the majority of website traffic now comes from mobile. The On-To-Go web browsing attitude of individuals has given a huge increase to mobile usage, therefore, the mobile-friendliness of a website is a SERP factor.
Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool is a tool that can help any business website measure its mobile-friendliness. A business website needs to be mobile-friendly and desktop friendly. Not having a mobile-friendly website can lower traffic, and conversions and increase bounce rate.
To boost mobile-friendliness, it’s important to have a responsive web design. Blocking any ads or unnecessary pop-ups is also important for a brilliant page user experience, especially on mobile. Also, keep the design simple as a complex design on a small screen will hamper the page experience. Larger button sizes and fonts are necessary for individuals to have a great page experience on mobile.
8. Don’t Forget About Local SEO
Local SEO is crucial for small businesses as it allows a business to attain a local audience. This type of SEO helps small businesses to get some customers from nearby. Business listings or citations allow a business to get listed on local business listing websites. Some popular local listing websites are Google Business Profile, Yelp, Manta, and more. Being on these listing websites establishes that a firm or a business is legitimate and hence, provides products or services at a local level.
Having a Google Business Profile, not only allows businesses to appear in local search results but an individual can also access the business on Google Maps. This makes it easier for any individual to find a business, and locate it. On whatever business listing platform you may be, it’s essential to keep the NAP consistent. NAP means Name, Address, and Phone Number of a business. These three pieces of information should be consistent on all platforms.
Google Business Profile, in particular, plays an important role in the success of Local SEO. Having constant activity on this platform has always proven beneficial for local businesses. Therefore, maintenance of local listings is paramount and should be monitored, and updated frequently.
9. Rank For The Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets appear in a box and are displayed at the top of the search result page. Snippets are brief answers to questions often asked by individuals on Google. Therefore, writing sections in your content containing answers to people’s queries can allow your website content to get rank on the Featured Snippet spot.
So, to get a rank on the featured snippet spot you should always write content that answers people’s queries in your niche. However, there are formats you can opt for to get a rank on the featured snippet spot. Paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos are popular formats chosen for the featured snippet. So, make sure to include them in your writing.
Before that make sure to follow the above steps and get a rank within the top 10. That’s because featured snippets are chosen from the first top 10 ranks and its chances increase even more if the content is already ranking within the top 5. Hence, writing user intent content with proper formatting is the key to featured snippet success which will take you straight to the top.
10. Holistic User Friendliness
In user-friendliness, all aspects of the website are considered. It can involve content, the design of a website, page load speed, navigation, and more. Therefore, user-friendliness is a combination of various factors and all of them have to be optimized to provide the user with a smooth experience and boosted user-friendliness.
At the end of the day, Google only pushes those websites that provide individuals with a great user experience alongside providing relevant content. So, focusing on important experience parameters can genuinely help you succeed in your SEO efforts.
Conclusion
With an optimized SEO strategy, one can see the results within a period. Follow all the tips mentioned in this blog, to get the best results out of your SEO efforts. Dive deep into these tactics and you shall start seeing the results of your SEO efforts in some time.