If positioned properly, your website blog can generate unlimited highly qualified leads over and over again.
It can be a highly effective sales and marketing tool, converting casual visitors into paying customers. However, more than 90% of people never make it past the first page of Google.
So, a high Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking is crucial if you want to increase the number of organic leads you get from your website. There are several ways you can approach this, arguably the best one being optimizing the site for search engines.
An search engine optimized website usually has better metrics and a better chance of bringing in more relevant traffic, i.e., more opportunities to boost the conversion rate.
Here, we take a look at what SEO is, why it is important, and how you can improve your website’s SEO.
Simple Ways to Optimize a Website for SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of making necessary changes to your website to make it more discoverable on search engines.
Individually, SEO strategies often seem like “incremental improvements”; over time, when you’ve combined a few of these blog SEO techniques mentioned below, you will significantly improve the user experience on your website.
You are likely familiar with many of the steps discussed below. In this post, we will stick to simple ways you can optimize your website for SEO without diving deep into advanced technical SEO strategies.
On-page SEO
- Create high-quality content for your specific audience
This is arguably the most important SEO strategy you will ever implement on your website.
Search engine results pages are designed to present helpful, reliable information to the user. Creating highly relevant, high-quality, authoritative content for your specific target audience increases the organic traffic you receive on your blog, which further boosts your website’s authority and relevance.
Make sure that you update your content with the latest information regularly. Ultimately, Google and your goals are the same – bringing your audience the most updated information. Use that to your benefit.
- Optimize metadata
The content on your website is for your audience; the metadata is the content for search engines.
I.e., Search engines interpret website metadata information to identify how relevant your page is to the user search intent. Metadata includes page titles, descriptions, keywords, and other similar components that search engines crawl to identify and rank websites.
Optimize your website’s title tags and meta descriptions. Choose a unique title that accurately communicates the page’s content. Write a compelling meta description summarizing the page content and providing enough information so search engines can use them as snippets.
- Use relevant keywords throughout your content
As search engine algorithms continue to evolve, keyword research and selection are now more critical than ever.
The contextual relevance of the primary keyword in your blog should align with the user search intent. Choose relevant keywords and use them throughout your content as naturally as possible. Never sacrifice readability for SEO.
Also, try to use the primary keyword once in the title and meta description to help search engines understand what your page is about so that it can refer your website to your relevant audience.
- Utilize the power of linking
Build internal links between different blog posts on your website. Internal linking navigation not only helps your users get more information on a topic quickly, but it also helps search engines crawl your website more efficiently and show it to the relevant audience.
Getting backlinks from other websites was once the most important search ranking factor. Nowadays, search engines focus more on the quality than the quantity of backlinks.
Work towards making your site link-worthy, i.e., content-rich, authoritative, and unbiased. Share unique information and perspectives that add value to your customer and solve a pain point. This encourages more people to share your content, which, in turn, boosts the SEO.
Off-page SEO
Apart from improving the on-page user experience, there are some other optimizations you can make to improve the ranking of your website on the SERPs.
- Optimize your website’s social media profiles
Identify where your audience spends the most time and target platforms. For your social profiles, make sure that your brand identity is consistent. Write a compelling bio and use relevant keywords. Share valuable content to drive traffic to your website and actively participate in audience interactions.
- Create and share infographics
For some posts, search engines prefer media elements over texts. Infographics are highly shareable and can make your content-rich blog more visually appealing. You can repurpose these infographics on your social profiles to draw even more traffic to the website.
- Guest blog on other websites
Find relevant websites in your niche accepting guest posts and approach them for collaboration. These websites usually have high domain authority and trust scores, so any good SEO reputation from them will be shared with your website too. Depending on their needs, you can create fresh content on a new topic, or repurpose existing content with showcasing your expertise.
Final Thoughts
SEO is an ongoing process and will benefit your brand in the long run. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for improving your website’s SEO, and you should not trust any ‘hacks’ that promise overnight success.
Instead, keep making incremental changes to your website based on what your audience needs from your brand. Focus on improving their user experience on your website, and you will see your SEO strategies bearing results.
By following the tips in this blog post, you can improve your website’s SEO and start ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).