Stop following SEO strategies that don’t work. Discover the five essential SEO tips you need to grow your small business.
Many small businesses often struggle to attract quality leads to their website. That’s because there’s a common misconception that you need a big budget for advertising, which leaves many entrepreneurs feeling trapped and unsure of how to improve their digital presence.
The truth is that search engine optimization (SEO) can help you get consistent leads without having to pay a ton of money for advertising. SEO is a great way for your content to rank well on search engines, thus establishing your authority and improving online visibility.
And yet — some business owners shy away from SEO because it seems complex, and they don’t have time to learn all about it. Luckily, you don’t have to.
In this article, I’ll tell you about the five most beneficial things you can do to leverage SEO to grow your business. Let’s dig in.
1. Create quality content
Your website is an information hub that search engines analyse to determine whether it’s relevant to users. This means that if you want to establish topical authority and secure a good ranking on search engines, you need to create quality content.
For example, if you run an accounting agency, your website should have a blog section covering the most important topics about accounting. That way, search engines see you as an authority in the industry, which increases your chances of ranking high for relevant keywords.
So, what does quality content look like?
Quality content should be relevant, addressing the questions and needs of your target audience. It should also be deep, offering insights and solutions that showcase your expertise and match user intent.
Your content should also be engaging and valuable. You can achieve that through user-friendly storytelling, recent and trustworthy data, interactive elements, good visuals or thought-provoking discussions.
Poor-quality content is a short wall of unstructured, uninformative text with excess keyword stuffing, no visual elements and a lack of any benefit to the reader. Publishing this type of content brings no value to your business.
2. Use guest blogging
Backlinks are crucial to your website’s authority and ranking because they help establish credibility with search engines.
When other factors like content quality and user-friendliness are equal, search engines perceive a website with a higher number of quality backlinks as more authoritative and trustworthy. Essentially, backlinks function as endorsements from other websites, signaling to search algorithms that your content is valuable and relevant.
So, how do you get backlinks?
One practice you can use to acquire backlinks to your website is guest posting. It allows you to contribute well-crafted, insightful content to reputable websites in your industry, giving you a chance to position yourself as an authority.
Guest blogging has multiple benefits: It allows you to showcase your expertise in front of more people and helps you build backlinks. That’s a perfect way to boost your online visibility, outrank your competitors and attract a broader audience to your digital domain.
3. Create service landing pages
Service landing pages are dedicated sections on a website that provide detailed and focused information about specific products or services a business offers. They help support targeted marketing efforts and improve overall user experience.
Each service page presents an opportunity to optimize for specific keywords related to that offering. That allows you to match the user’s search intent and contributes to your overall SEO strategy.
Navigating a website becomes easier when visitors can easily find detailed information about the services they are looking for. Service pages streamline the user journey, reducing bounce rates and increasing engagement. They guide potential customers from exploration to engagement.
What does a service landing page look like?
Let’s say you are a personal injury lawyer looking to boost your SEO. Your service landing pages should be about slip and fall injuries, automobile accidents and workplace injuries. That provides quick and valuable information to people looking for these services and improves your visibility on search engines.
4. Create location landing pages
Location landing pages are designed to provide specific and localized information about the products or services a business offers in a particular geographic area.
They are crucial for businesses serving multiple locations because they improve local SEO efforts, offering a tailored approach that caters to the unique needs and search intent of users in a specific area. Dedicated landing pages for each city or region improve online visibility in local search results and provide a more personalized experience for potential customers. This increases the likelihood of successful conversion.
For example, a small personal injury law firm based in Texas would benefit from having location landing pages for cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano and Irving. Creating these unique pages on the website tailored to the legal needs of residents in each city can significantly improve local SEO efforts.
5. Improve website experience
In 2023, user experience impacts how well your content ranks on search engines. That’s because Google and other search engines want to ensure their users are satisfied with search results, which is why they go for solutions that are simple, quick and accessible.
Here’s how you can improve your website experience for your visitors:
Create strategic CTAs to guide users in their journey
Optimize content readability
In 2023, you don’t need a hefty advertising budget to grow your small business. All you need is to be strategic with your SEO efforts.
Creating quality content, service landing pages and location landing pages helps you set a good base for your SEO. Guest blogging and optimizing your website experience can help take your SEO to the next level.
Use these five strategies to transform your digital presence and grow your business.
Founder at MintSEO. Nick Zviadadze is a growth marketing specialist with more than eight years of experience in SEO, copywriting and content marketing. He’s the founder of MintSEO, a fully-remote SEO and content marketing agency. He helps businesses drive growth by improving their search visibility.
In this article SEOLEVELUP focuses on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021.
With more than 4.5 Billion Google searches a day, you will need to play by the rules of Google to rank high enough for potential visitors to come across your content. Improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is one of the best ways to ensure that you are making full use of your content. Check out our SEO Tips that will help your website improve online visibility and rankings.
Before you get started, be sure to get our FREE SEO Audit if you want to see needed improvements to your website! Also check out our Google reviews and read some success stories!
Organizations need a way to assess and view their SEO activities in today’s data-driven environment to stay ahead. To accomplish this, 73% of marketers use SEO tools to refine their content and improve Google’s content ratings.
You can increase the probability of obtaining organic website traffic by introducing small changes to the content of your website.
In this article I focus on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021. In the new year, it will break down Best SEO Companies for small business and clarify some strategies to enhance SEO.
Best SEO Tips to Implement in 2021
Monitor with a Program that works with Search Engines
Understanding Google Analytics is the best step that you can take in enhancing your SEO in 2021. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to understand your website, so you can make good decisions based on results.
Not only can statistics help you understand how you rank, but also your audience, so that content can be better created for them.
Google Analytics can be a fantastic tool over time to target the customers better. Some of the indicators you can learn from visitors to your site include:
What browsers they use
Google Analytics will give you powerful insights on which browsers your customers use. By concentrating on web design on the most-used browsers, will allow you to enhance their experience.
The devices used to visit your site
Similar to knowing the browsers your customers use, knowing what devices they use can be helpful. There are more web users on those pages than desktop users or vice versa. Understanding the metrics of your website will allow you to develop content customized to the screen size that is most widely used, improving the user experience.
Understand your competition
Google Analytics also provides insights into traffic from rivals. When determining how to boost your content and outrank rivals, this knowledge can be useful.
Refresh Website with new material
There is one thing in common with content marketers who create high-ranking content. They provide readers with engaging content topics. Successful marketing managers track patterns and discussions to brainstorm content ideas. This ensures that at some stage you’re going to have to revisit low-performing content.
Consider what kind of content would resonate with your audience when designing your content marketing strategy. From there, you can analyse what headlines will do well for that subject and whether you can establish some prequel topics.
Many content marketers consider mind maps to be useful. Using a mind map for visual individuals will help you present all of your future topic ideas. It will enable you to create larger topics that can be built into similar, smaller items. Visualizing your content plan can help you grasp it completely sometimes.
Ensure you create your Content around Keywords
Researching keywords not only works for your content and helps to develop your piece’s framework but it also allows you to understand what your audience wants to read. You can help build a content strategy to boost SEO by understanding what keywords are best for your target audience and content type.
Google-friendly writing depends on a balance between keywords and everyday language being proven. This implies that it should be written in such a way that your content flows naturally. In your content, keywords should naturally come up so that you don’t have to stuff your content at the last minute.
There is an option for the Keyword Magic Tool where you can look up related keywords for your primary keyword. To help you identify whether it is something you will want to add to your content.
You will see how closely related a keyword is and its search volume. You can talk with your SEO Agency and can make small changes to boost your SEO ranking gradually.
Expand your Portfolio Backlink
Even if you follow all of the tips related to on-page technical SEO, Google’s front page will still not be proven. A large portion of SEO deals with backlinks and whether high-authority sites generate backlinks.
Diversity in backlinks can come from two sources, specifically: The type of backlink
In general, a dofollow or nofollow would be your backlink, with a dofollow bearing more weight.
A site where the backlink originates
For example, if you are promoting your content and targeting publishers to run a story, the source of your backlink will be the site that links back to your content.
A diverse portfolio of backlinks signals to Google that your website is an authoritative source. Also that you naturally create links versus relying on automated tools or other spam tactics.
Use Appropriate Header tags
You want to be aware of how you organize the content on the page while creating content. With the most relevant details at the top of the page, each page should have content arranged logically.
Studies have noticed that 80% of readers spend much of their time at the top of the page looking at the content. How great are these SEO Tips?
Google does not, however, inherently index meaning exclusively to what is at the top of the list. To see if it’s comprehensive, they look at the article as a whole. So with that in mind, you may need to put some effort into how the page is laid out.
Consider adding jump links to the top of your page to get the most out of the keywords you’re targeting.
Not only does this create a more enjoyable user experience, but it also encourages you to use your header tags to go after Google Gathering Information from a sample in more innovative ways.
Conclusion
Search engines work overtime to list the billions of websites on the internet because of the content being made and released quickly. Get in touch with us today and we can discuss how to improve your online rankings.
Besides, you can improve SEO on your site and start ranking higher on Google by using tools to look at critical factors that affect it, such as loading speed, content problems, meta tags, linking, and crawlability.
I hope you enjoyed these amazing SEO Tips and be sure to get a FREE SEO Audit today!
Happy new year, readers! We’re back with a brand new season of Whiteboard Friday episodes for your viewing pleasure.
First up: Moz SEO expert Cyrus Shepard shares his top 21 tips for successful Google SEO in 2021, including what to prioritize and what to look out for in the year ahead. He’s also included a bunch of helpful resources for your reference in the transcription below!
Watch and enjoy, and as always, leave your questions and your own suggestions in the comment section.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today, so glad that you can join us. We are talking about 21 smart Google SEO tips for 2021. We’re getting ready for a new year, a new year of SEO strategies. These are 21 practical tips that you can implement that should, hopefully, move the needle on your organic traffic.
These are some of the best tips that I’ve collected over the past year. Many of them that I’m going to use myself in my own SEO strategies.
Now we have four categories: increasing clicks, content/on-page SEO tips, technical SEO, and a little bit of link building. There are 21 of these. These are going to go fast. We’re trying to do 10 to 12 minutes, so we don’t get to spend a lot of time on each one. But don’t fret. We’re going to link to appropriate resources in the transcript below so that we can keep along and explore a little bit more. All right. Ready to dive in?
Increasing clicks
Let’s start with clicks, specifically earning more clicks from Google without actually ranking higher, because that’s one of the great things about SEO. You don’t actually have to rank higher to get more traffic if you can get more clicks from the rankings that you already have. So let’s talk about some specific strategies for getting more clicks without increasing rankings.
1. Favicon optimization
First, favicon optimization.
Now I’m surprised more people haven’t talked about this in 2020. Google displays favicons in mobile search results, and they can influence your click-through rate if they’re high contrast, if they’re visible or not visible. Having a good favicon can make a few percentage points difference, very minor, but it does make a difference if you can get it right. Aaron Wall, SEO Book, wrote one of the very few posts about that.
2. Breadcrumb optimization
While we’re optimizing our favicons, let’s take a look at breadcrumb optimization. Google displays breadcrumbs in both desktop and mobile search results. They can be keyword-rich breadcrumbs, which can influence your click-through rate. Now Google gets their breadcrumbs from a lot of places. That can be your URL, your schema markup, your actual breadcrumbs on the page.
What you want to do is make sure Google is displaying the breadcrumbs that you want them to display, using those keywords that you choose. The best way to do that, make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually on your page with links, that you’re using schema markup. Ideally, it would match your URL structure, but that isn’t always necessary. So a great breadcrumb optimization audit.
3. Meta descriptions
Let’s optimize those meta descriptions. This is so old-school SEO. But a recent study shows that 30% of websites don’t even use meta descriptions. Now that’s understandable because another study shows that 70% of the time, Google will rewrite the meta description, usually because it’s not using the keywords that the user is searching for. But if we write a well-crafted meta description, it can compel users to click, and that means using keyword-rich descriptions that people are actually searching for, so when Google does use your meta description, it’s encouraging those clicks and acting as marketing copy for your website.
4. Numbers in titles
Along with meta descriptions, titles. Just shared a study recently showing that dates added to titles increased rankings for a particular brand. Numbers are generally one thing that I always test in title tags that usually produce pretty consistent results. Specifically, dates in title tags are often a winner, January 2021.
Don’t be spammy about it. Don’t include it if it doesn’t make sense and don’t fake it. But if you can include a number, it will often increase your click-through rate for any given query.
5. <Title> boilerplate
How about doing a boilerplate audit for your title tag? Tip number five. What’s boilerplate? Boilerplate are the parts of your title tag that repeat every single time.
For example, here at Moz, we put “Moz,” our brand name at the end of every title tag. We used to put “Whiteboard Friday” at the end of every Whiteboard Friday until we tested it and found out that we actually got more clicks and higher rankings when we removed it. So boilerplate, you want your titles to be unique, provide unique value. So I would encourage you to experiment with your boilerplate and see if removing it actually increases your rankings.
Tip number six: schema, specifically FAQ and how-to schema. Google gave us a huge gift when they introduced these in search results. FAQ schema gives you a lot of SERP real estate. You can’t always win it, and you can’t always win the how-to schema, but when you do, that can definitely increase or influence people to click on your result, expand those FAQ schemas out.
It’s not appropriate for every page. You want to make sure that you actually have those FAQs on your pages. But it is one way, in appropriate situations, that you can increase clicks without increasing your actual Google ranking. All right.
Content can go stale after a few years. So we launch content. You have a blog, you launch it, and you share it on social media. Most people forget about it after that. So go back, look at your top content over the last two to five years or even 10 years, if you want to go back that far, and see what you can relaunch by updating it, keeping it on the same URL. In some cases, you can see gains of 500% to 1,000% just by relaunching some of your old content with some updates.
So do a relaunch audit in 2021.
8. Increase internal linking
Number eight: increasing internal linking. Now a lot of top SEO agencies, when they need to quickly increase rankings for clients, there are generally two things that they know are the easiest levers to pull. First, title tags and meta descriptions, what’s getting more clicks, but second is increasing the internal linking.
You know that you can increase internal links on your site, and there are probably some opportunities there that you just haven’t explored. So let’s talk about a couple easy ways to do that without having too much work.
9. Update old content with new links
Number nine is updating your old content with new links. This is a step that we see people skip time and time again. When you publish a new blog post, publish a new piece of content, make sure you’re going back and updating your old content with those new links.
So you’re looking at the top keyword that you want to rank for, and going in Google Search Console or checking tools like Keyword Explorer to see what other pages on your site rank for that keyword, and then adding links to the new content to those pages. I find when I do this, time and time again, it lowers the bounce rate. So you’re not only updating your old page with fresh content and fresh links and adding relevance. You’re adding links to your new content. So make sure, when you publish new content, you’re updating your old content with those new links.
10. Remove unnecessary links
Number 10, remove unnecessary links from your content. Now this is a form of PageRank sculpting. PageRank sculpting is a dirty word in SEO, but actually it works to a certain extent. It’s not nofollow link page sculpting.
It is removing unnecessary links. Do you really need a link to your team page on every page of your website? Do you need a link to your contact form on every page of your website? In many cases, you don’t. Sometimes you do. But if you remove the unnecessary links, you can pass more link equity through the links that actually count, and those links are a major Google ranking signal.
11. Mobile link parity audit
Number 11, need you to do a mobile link parity audit. What is that? What is a mobile link parity audit? That is ensuring that the links on your mobile site are the same as the links on your desktop site. Why is that important? Well, the last couple of years Google has moved to a mobile first index, meaning what they see on your mobile site, that’s your website.
That’s what counts. So a lot of sites, they have a desktop site, and then they reduce it to their mobile site and they’re missing links. They get rid of header navigation, footer links, and things like that. A recent study showed that the average desktop page has 61 links and the average mobile page has 54 links. That means on the web as a whole there are seven fewer links on mobile pages than desktop pages, meaning a lot of link equity is being lost.
So do a study on your own website. Make sure you have mobile link parity between your desktop and your mobile site so you’re not losing that equity.
12. Invest in long-form content
Number 12: need you to invest in long-form content. Now I am not saying that content length is a ranking factor. It is not. Short-form content can rank perfectly well. The reason I want you to invest in long-form content is because consistently, time and time again, when we study this, long-form content earns more links and shares.
It also generally tends to rank higher in Google search results. Nothing against short-form content. Love short-form content. But long-form content generally gives you more bang for your buck in terms of SEO ranking potential.
13. Use more headers
When you’re doing that long-form content, make sure you do number 13: use more headers. I’m talking about H2 and H3 tags.
Break up your content with good, keyword-rich header tags. Why? Well, we have research from A.J. Ghergich that shows that the more header tags you have, generally you rank for more featured snippets. Sites with 12-13, which seems like a lot of header tags, rank for the most featured snippets of anything that they looked at in their most recent study.
So make sure you’re breaking up your content with header tags. It adds a little contextual relevance. It’s a great way to add some ranking potential to your content.
14. Leverage topic clusters
Number 14, leverage topic clusters. Don’t just launch one piece of content. Make sure you write about multiple pieces of content around the same subject and link those together. When you do that and you link them intelligently, you can increase engagement because people are reading the different articles.
You can add the right contextual inner links. I have a great case study that I want to show you in the transcript below, where someone did this and produced amazing results. So look into topic clusters for 2021.
15. Bring content out of tabs
Finally, bring your content out of tabs. If you have content that is in accordions or drop-downs or you have to click to reveal the content, study after study after study shows that content that’s brought out of tabs and brought into the main body, so people don’t have to click to see, generally performs better than content that’s hidden in tabs.
Now to be clear, I don’t believe that Google discriminates content in tabs. They seem to be able to index and rank it just fine. But I think people generally engage with content when it’s out of tabs, and maybe some of those signals help those pages to rank a little better.
Technical SEO
All right. Just a very few technical SEO tips. We’re going fast.
16. Core Web Vitals
Number 16: this is the year to invest in Core Web Vitals. These are some of the page experience signals that Google is bringing to the forefront in 2021. It’s going to be an actual ranking factor very soon. We’re talking about cumulative shift layout, hard word to say. Generally, we’re talking about site speed and delivering great page experience. Now some of these things are very technical, and Google has some tools, like Lighthouse, to try to help you to figure them out.
One tip I like to share, if you are on WordPress, I highly recommend using Cloudflare, in particular their APO for WordPress. It’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website and help you score better for some of these Core Web Vitals. It’s very low cost, it’s easy to implement, and it’s a great way to speed up your WordPress website.
17. Limit sitemaps to 10,000
Number 17: sitemaps. Sitemaps, you’re allowed to have 50,000 URLs per sitemap. This is always a question in every SEO quiz. How many URLs per sitemap are you allowed? Instead, if you have a large site and you have indexing issues, tip number 17, limit your sitemaps to 10,000 URLs. You don’t have to use all 50,000.
We have some evidence that using smaller sitemaps, compressing those into a limited URL set can actually improve your crawlability of those. It’s kind of like Google might prioritize those in some way. The data seems to support it. You also get a little bit better data out of Google Search Console. You can see what’s being indexed and what’s not.
18. Leverage dynamic sitemaps
Also, leverage dynamic sitemaps. Our friend Oliver Mason shows — that I’ll link to in the transcript below — that a dynamic sitemap is a sitemap that changes based upon what you want Google to crawl. So if you have a large corpus of URLs that you want Google to crawl, put the high priority ones in their own special sitemap.
Maybe you limit it to one thousand URLs. As Google crawls and discovers those, remove them and put in additional high priority URLs that you want Google to discover. Keep the sitemap small and tight, and let Google know that those are the ones that you want them to pay attention to.
Link building
Let’s quickly talk about link building tips for 2021, because everybody loves link building.
No, kidding. Everybody hates link building. Link building is so hard. There are some professionals and there are some great people in the industry who do love it, who are great at it. Personally, I’m not that great at link building, but I still am able to build a lot of links.
19. Passive link acquisition
One way that I’m able to do that is number 19: passive link acquisition. What passive link acquisition means is creating content that passively earns links as people discover it in the SERPs.
It means I don’t have to outreach to people. It means that when they find it, when journalists find it, when bloggers find it, they naturally want to link to it. You do that by creating the types of content that journalists and bloggers and web creators are looking for. These are generally data, guides, definitions, how to, such as this video. When you create that kind of content, it generally earns a lot of links as people find it. Passive link building is one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time.
20. Page-level link intersect
Number 20, page-level link intersect. When you do have to do outreach, you want to do outreach to the pages most likely to link to you. Now we’ve known for a long time one of the top SEO tips for link building is find websites that link to your competitors but not to you.
I like to make that a little more specific and find web pages that link to at least two of my competitors but not to me. That means that they are generally a resource page, if they’re linking to multiple competitors but not to me, and more likely to link to me if I ask them. We have a great tool here at Moz, Link Explorer, that does page-level link intersect. I think it’s the best tool for this specific task in the SEO industry, not because I’m biased, because I actually use it.
21. Be the last click
Tip number 21 for 2021, be the last click. What do I mean by that? I mean satisfy your users. Once you earn the first click, you want to get that first click that people click, but you also want to be the last click. That means they found what they are looking for. User satisfaction is ranking signal number one. Your goal with all of this is to satisfy the user, to give them what they search for.
That’s the magic of SEO. They’re searching for something, and you’re delivering it to them at the exact moment they search for it. When you can be the last click, you’re almost guaranteed to rise in rankings and get the traffic that you deserve.
All right, those are 21 tips. That’s your roadmap for 2021. Hope you enjoyed it. Please share this video and share your tips for 2021 in the comments below.
Cyrus Shepard is the founder of Zyppy, an SEO consulting and software company. He writes/tweets about Google ranking signals, SEO best practices, experiments, tactics, and industry updates.For the latest, follow Cyrus on Twitter, or check out more of his posts on Moz.
Simple search engine optimization hints to increase your traffic
If you want more visitors to your website, one of the first things you’ll want to do is improve your website’s ranking on Google. This process is called search engine optimization (SEO). It is a crucial element of managing a successful website or online store.
Many things have been said about SEO, including that it is more luck than skill or that it’s a pay-to-play system, where the highest-paying sites get the best visibility. Neither of these is true.
In this article, we will provide you with several basic steps you can take to improve your SEO strategy and ensure that your website is shown prominently on Google searches.
When someone makes a Google search, they are shown two types of results: paid results and organic results.
Paid results are those from websites that have paid Google directly for their website to be shown above organic results. Studies have shown that while this is one way to increase traffic to your site, Google users prefer to click on organic results.
Organic results are not paid for and are determined by a variety of factors, including the page’s content and metadata, and how closely these relate to the search query. Therefore, the goal of SEO is to increase the number of organic results that lead to visits to your website.
How search engines determine what pages to show and how to show them is complicated and goes well beyond this article’s scope. However, a few essential points should be made.
First, search engines use bots or computer programs to trawl the web, following links and visiting all publicly accessible websites. They then use this information to build enormous indexes that are consulted each time an internet user performs a Google search.
Once a user has entered a query, the search engine will refer to these extensive indexes, incorporating tens or hundreds of different factors into complex ranking algorithms. These, in turn, determine what content to display on the search results page. PageRank, Google’s preferred algorithm, relies on over 200 different metrics to determine Google search rankings.
You can leverage these hundreds of metrics to improve your website’s Google ranking. Although we won’t be able to look at all 200, we’ll discuss the most important ones.
Let’s look at nine essential steps that you can take to improve your website’s Google ranking.
1. Creating a sitemap is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your website’s search rankings. This will enable Google’s bots to quickly and efficiently index your entire site, and it will ensure that no pages are missing (and cannot be found through Google searches). You can submit a sitemap file to Google via their Webmasters website.
2. Make sure you provide the necessary information to bots with a robots.txt file. More information is available on this website, but basically, keeping on the bots’ good side is one of the best things you can do to ensure your website features prominently in Google searches.
3. Here’s a simple one: Delete duplicate content. Search engine bots hate duplication, and it’s one of the easiest ways to see your site tumble down the Google search rankings. Some website managers think that creating pages designed to detect search engine bots is a good idea, but it will backfire and hurt your website’s SEO rankings.
4. Although less crucial than in the past, it still helps to create static versions of your webpages. Static content is more easily interpreted by search engine bots, at least more efficiently than dynamic content.
5. Create permalinks for your pages using keywords (for example: “/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/”). These will result in better search rankings than permalinks containing mostly numbers or other random information. A good rule of thumb is that the more identifiable data you can provide the bot, the better.
6. An organized website with clear internal linking architecture will have higher Google rankings. This means displaying important information on the homepage and ensuring that similar content is grouped together on dedicated pages. A menu such as the one below makes it easy for search engine bots to index your site.
7. When creating text-based content, use keywords that your audience is likely to search for. These should be used throughout your text (don’t overdo it, though) and featured in the title of your article and its permalink. And remember, search engine bots can’t read images or text. If your site posts have many pictures, videos, or screenshots of text, add captions or descriptions that bots will be able to interpret.
8. Make sure your keywords are related to your business objectives. If you don’t know which ones are most relevant to your field, look them up. Finding the right keywords is essential if you want to feature prominently on Google searches.
9. One of the main ways that Google and other search engines rank content is by the number of sites that link to yours. If your webpages are frequently mentioned on other websites, your site will quickly begin shooting up the Google rankings. However, this is not always simple, and entire businesses exist to increase the number of inbound links to your website.
Time to call an SEO expert?
While the advice in this article will undoubtedly help you improve your website’s Google rankings, there’s only so much that you can do yourself. SEO agencies or experts have worked in this field for years and have an intuitive understanding of search engine algorithms.
Trustworthy SEO agencies will provide results-based testimonials that show how they improved a business’s SEO and Google rankings. However, be wary of SEO experts promising top-ranking Google results or radical increases in traffic to your site. Real SEO is a process of gradual improvement rather than overnight success.
A final point worth making is that when it comes to SEO, money can only get you so far. An in-house SEO strategy or a trustworthy SEO agency can certainly help you improve your Google search ranking. But the only guaranteed way to do this is to create high-quality content. Without that, even the best SEO strategy will only get you so far.
For a small business, a solid SEO strategy is essential to driving growth and building interest in a brand – these tips will help to take your small business to the next level
Starting a business is not an easy process and it becomes even harder when you are looking to expand your business. If you have a small business, you need to be present in most digital platforms to advertise your products or the services you are offering. Some of the digital platforms you should join include social media and search engines. However, start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) might find consultants and SEO services quite expensive – especially if they have not done thorough research and they are looking to keep costs low.
Here is an SEO checklist that will help you prioritize your SEO tasks for a small business enterprise:
1. Know your target audience well
This is very important because you will know who you are selling to and your target market. When you know who your target audience is or will be, it becomes easy to market your products or services, create content and search for the keywords to use among other things. Therefore, whether you are hiring an SEO agency or you are doing it yourself, you need to research your target audience to make the right choices.
2. Fix technical issues and optimize your page
If you do not know anything about SEO or you have a piece of limited knowledge about SEO, it is advisable to hire an SEO expert agency or an expert to offer SEO services. Your website should not have any technical issues like duplicate content, broken links and slow page speed. If these issues are not fixed, they will affect your rankings and traffic to your page, making it hard to benefit from SEO strategies.
After fixing the technical issues, you need to optimize the page by creating quality content by conducting thorough research. Some of the things you need to optimize when creating content are:
Titles.
Meta descriptions.
Alt text and images.
Body content.
3. Register and optimize Google My Business
When starting a business, you need to make it very easy for people to find you on Google places and on the internet. Therefore, you will have to register and optimize your Google My Business to enable customers and other people to find you with ease. Optimizing your Google My Business is easy because you only need to claim and verify it on its website. Some of the things you should remember when optimizing your business are:
Fill out as many fields as possible to enhance your listing (e.g., adding videos and photos).
Choose the right category for your business.
4. Manage the local business listings and citations
When optimizing your business, you need to understand that consistency and accuracy is very important to avoid confusing people. As a result, your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) should be accurate to improve your local presence. If you don’t know your accurate NAP, you can look for a service that will distribute your NAP information so that you can update the info on your page.
5. Add schema markup
Schema markup usually sends search engine signals about the components of a page, including:
Phone number.
Address.
Business number.
Ratings.
Business hours.
6. Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools
If you have a website already, you need to register with search engines such as Google and Bing and submit your sitemap. This is very important because you will find out what the search engines understand and know about your search engine content.
7. Register with Google analytics
Even though the webmaster tools can offer you a wide range of information from about search engines, Google Analytics offers a lot of information about users’ views. Knowing your users’ views is important because you will know their experience on your website and understand how you can offer them a better experience by improving your content or services. Google analytics should help you find out the following:
It’s that time of the year again: reflecting on the year that’s past as we prepare for 2019 lurking around the corner. In this article, we have a roundup of some of our fan favorite pieces from 2018 on SEO.
From how to’s to tips to tools, these were some of our highlights from the past year. SEW spark notes, if you will.
If you missed these pieces throughout the year, they’ll be worth a read. And if you’ve already read them, never hurts to refresh!
On Monday, we’ll have a roundup of our top articles on search industry news and trends.
1. How to force Google to recrawl your website
If you have launched a new website, updated a single page on your existing domain, or altered many pages and/or the structure of your site, you will likely want Google to display your latest content in its SERPs.
While Google’s crawlers are obviously pretty good at their job — indexing countless new pages simply from natural traffic and links from around the web — it never hurts to give Googlebot a little assistance.
In this article, we look at a few ways to alert Google’s crawlers to new URLs on your site.
2. How to set up event tracking in Google Analytics
Because one can never have enough Google Analytics insight, right?
One of the most useful features in GA, event tracking lets you capture all kinds of information about how people behave on your site.
In this article, we go step by step through two different ways you can set up event tracking: first, by adding the code manually, and second, by using Google Tag Manager.
This is a great tutorial for anyone looking to familiarize themselves with the task.
3. A quick and easy guide to meta tags in SEO
Meta tags help search engines and website visitors determine what the content of your page is about.
They’re placed in the <head> section of a HTML document and need to be coded into your CMS. Depending on the platform you use, this can be quite less intense than it sounds.
Many “out of the box” solutions provide extremely user-friendly, labelled sections such as “meta description” calling your attention to exactly what goes where.
In this article, we take a look at why meta tags are important, along with the six main types of meta tags to focus on for SEO.
4. An SEO’s survival guide to Single Page Applications (SPAs)
For anyone who’s ever had questions about what SEOs should do with Single Page Applications (SPAs), this article is for you. Long, thorough, entertaining, and full of resources.
We start out looking at how the popularity of SPAs, Angular, and React have spiked in the last several years. Many developers eagerly embrace JavaScript for website development — and while that may have been rather inconsiderate of SEO ease (what else is new), it seems JS really is here to stay.
This article is bit of a coming to terms with that reality, accepting SPAs as part of our SEO future, and even dipping our toes in, if you will.
We look at what developers like about JS, how it was never intended for web page content delivery, common SEO problems of SPAs, and a host of other questions you might be asking.
Finally, we end with eleven recommendations for further reading — really, this could become the whole rest of your holiday break — on how Google treats SPAs, core principles of SEO for JS and for SPAs, and more information than you could want.
5. How to check your Domain Authority: 4 tools to use
Domain Authority (DA) serves as a handy heuristic in the SEO industry. It helps tell us how likely a site is to rank for specific keywords, based on the SEO authority it holds.
Many SEOs use Domain Authority to sense-check the quality of their inbound links and to understand how these are affecting their own’s site’s SEO health.
In this article, we round up some of the best ways to check out domain authority. We look at what factors go into DA, and how these tools go about calculating it.
‘Domain Authority’ was devised by Moz and they have naturally taken ownership of this name. Their suite of tools (some of which are discussed in this article) will reveal the authority of particular domains, but dozens of other free tools use Moz’s API to show these scores too.
6. 15 actionable SEO tips to improve your search rankings
This is another quite popular deep dive into SEO tips. We know “improving search rankings” gets a lot of fluff, but this is not that.
Here, we look closely at what makes RankBrain tick, and 15 ways to use that to your fancy.
Sections cover tips around optimizing keywords, optimizing title tags, optimizing descriptions, and reducing bounce rates and dwell times. Fun fact: research by HubSpot and Outbrain found that titles with brackets performed 33 percent better than titles without.
Questions about how to add LSI keywords? How long should long-form content really be? Benefits of long-tail vs medium size keywords? How much difference in clicks will a few characters too long in a headline actually make? All of that and much more (along with lots of screenshots) here.
7. 30 ways to market your online business for free
This article is a roundup of exactly what it sounds like — 30 ways to market your online business for free. It covers everything from emails to social media, from Google Analytics to Search Console, from forums to guest posting, from metadata to Schema.org.
While a few of the ways could be updated — posting to Google+, for instance, might be less helpful anymore — the list still provides some hefty inspiration to anyone needing a little boost of ideas for what to do online.
8. Four tools to discover and optimize for related keywords
This was a quite recent article that has soared. As we know, for SEO these days we need content that includes related concepts, satisfies intent, and provides value. The days of exact keyword matching are far behind us.
In this article, we have four great tools to use when optimizing for related keywords — and of course, how to use them.
For instance, the first tool in the list is TextOptimizer. It takes a term you give it, looks at the Google search results page, extracts snippets, and applies semantic analysis.
With that, it ouputs a list of all the related topics, terms, and concepts that form your topic cluster. From that cluster, it recommends you choose 15-25 of the words for a higher rank.
9. How to optimize your Google My Business listing
Lest we forget: local search.
For those looking to rank higher in searches tied to a user’s location — i.e. users that might be quite near your store and itching to buy something — a Google My Business listing is an essential first step.
This article gives a how to guide for first setting up your listing, claiming and verifying your business, filling out the information, and adding photos. From there, we go over gathering reviews, posting updates, monitoring your profile, and tracking data from Insights.
Of all the many, many things to do in SEO, optimizing a Google My Business listing is very straightforward. It can have a profoundly positive effect on your SEO — a whole wealth of ranking opportunity up for grabs.
