Need to perfectly optimize your website for Google via SEO? This article gives you some essential tips to do just that…
Fact is, optimizing your website for a search engine is the ultimate board game. Only Google is the pied piper who knows all the rules of the game. However, business owners, digital marketers and developers do know how the pieces (their website) move across the board.
This is where we learn how you carry your SEO efforts effectively and optimize your website to up its ranking for Google.
Analyze your website data for SEO purposes
Only the amount of traffic coming to your website won’t tell the entire picture, but when different types of data are gathered and observed at the same time, patterns start to form. Hence, helping you to make conclusions.
For example, if only a few people visit your website and doesn’t register any CTR, it might be much to stress about. However, if a large number of visitors are moving out without any CTR to show, it will become necessary to make some relevant adjustments.
Google Analytics tool helps with the traffic and other key data according to the needs of the users.
For instance, Google Search Console tracks important metrics. This includes the number of sessions, number of unique sessions, bounce rate, etc. The User Behavior report will inform you the behavioral pattern of users navigating to your website.
Referral sources tells a lot about the nature of your visitors. How are people navigating to your website? And locate pages that are registering more traffic and conversions than others. The idea is to closely analyze the data and understand patterns.
Conduct a thorough keyword research for SEO
Gone are the easy days when picking a keyword. Stuffing it in a 500-word piece and getting it on the first page the next day was a piece of cake. It isn’t as simple anymore as it used to.
Tools like Google AdWords, Ahrefs, etc. are used to extract keywords relevant to your business and blog niche. Use such tools to locate long-tail keywords matching your customers’ intent. Try to understand why they would search for particular keywords and what can they expect to find on a page containing that keyword.
For instance, let suppose you offer pet walking services. Here you can start with “dog walking” as a broad keyword.
The keyword research tool you use will find several related keywords. The keywords can be filtered in various different ways. The idea is to find some long-tail keywords fitting the needs of your particular audience segment.
Users should use the keywords in all the web copies and blog content they create without stuffing unnecessarily.
Create lengthy, but valuable content
The reign of 500-word content pieces is long gone. The demand for relevant, long, and competitive content is on the rise. According to Buffer, a great piece should be of 1600 words, at least.
However, prior to finalizing the minimum length of your on-site articles, search your primary keyword and examine the top 10 search results in the SERPs. If you find some pieces around 1600 words or above, apparently, then your pieces should follow course too.
Albeit, do note that the entire focus doesn’t reside on the length aspect only, but it surely gives an impression to Google that you’ve added more information or discussed the topic in detail.
Optimize for on-page SEO
On-page SEO elements such as headlines, subheadings, slugs, and meta tags inform on how to optimize the website when creating specific pages.
Starting with the headline, place your primary keyword in it or as closely in the starting paragraph as possible. The keyword will also appear in the URL slug and in at least one subheading. Ideally, the keyword should be kept within 0.5 to 2.5% density and not go for the outdated stuffing approach.
Try to evenly spread your primary and secondary keywords within your content piece, subheadings and image alt text. The professional should know how to create relevant context for each keyword within the copy. This should be done to help Google understand what is being talked about.
Optimize for off-page SEO
As the name suggests, off-page SEO is the work done to optimize your website through external mediums. These medium include influencer marketing, guest blogging, social media marketing and related activities to uplift your brand.
Talking about backlinks, they make a great deal of difference in directing a significant number of users to your website. However, avoid getting links from low authority, small websites that offer little or no value at all.
Rather, go for high profile, authentic sources when finding quality backlinks.
Optimize for mobile website
With more than 2.5 billion smartphones users across the globe, users today are more inclined to use internet on their phones than desktops. Apparently, it doesn’t matter if you run a top app design company or a small retail store next door, you don’t want to lose a mighty chunk of your audience base holding the potential to be your core customers.
Since the emergence of the mobile-first index trend, it is clear that websites that are mobile friendly have a higher chance of better ranking as compared to websites which aren’t optimized for mobile.
A responsive web design is the design you need for your business. You can easily download premium or free WordPress themes with a built-in responsive design. This doesn’t require you to add separate code.
Acquire pages with a higher speed
Your page speed is quite vital when we talk about SEO output and eventual conversions. With the attention span of online visitors lessening more and more with time, obviously, your visitors won’t be sticking around with your website taking like “forever” to load, and will search for other alternates.
Inspect your website through Google PageSpeed Insights and acquire valuable information regarding how fast the website loads across various devices, how to quicken your website speed, and more.
Acquire quality backlinks for SEO purposes
As stated above, quality backlinks are the driving factor to help your website climb the rankings ladder. Try to get high profile, quality websites link with yours. In doing so, your website develops a sense of credibility in the good books of Google.
Although easier said than done, but acquiring quality backlinks pays off the effort and time invested by your SEO team. You can start sharing your content pieces with popular influencers and industry experts through email marketing, social media marketing, etc. with a link of the page the article is published on.\
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