Websites are meant to improve business performance, create brand trust, and build relationships with your customers. But before all that happens, your customers need to find you online. Although you can use paid advertising to reach your targeted audience on various platforms, you will need to optimise your site for free traffic from SERPs.
Your site should appear on the top pages of Google search to acquire the highest traffic for free. The advantages of SEO are numerous but bear in mind that a website with established SEO will continue to receive traffic for an extended period and build your dominance on the web.
These are 10 of the most critical areas to focus on when working on SEO for your website.
1. Create Relevant and Informational Content
You have heard several times that content is king. But have you asked yourself the type of content that Google considers worth ranking for any website? Writing anything to fill your web pages will not help you to rank on any search engine. Google is looking for informational content that answers user questions around products. To qualify as quality content, you should also ensure it is grammatically correct and steer away from plagiarism.
Regardless of the type of website you run and the business model, search engines often see new content. You can lose your ranking easily if you fail to update your content. That explains why you need to have a blog section on your website. But you can also update the content around your products often so that Google bots can capture the latest version for ranking.
2. Use Header Tags
Breaking your content into chunks helps readers to follow your ideas easily. Search engines also use the structured headers to identify the keywords and important ideas your content is about. Bots usually scan through pages, and they pay attention to headers.
The points on the subheadings you have on the page make the most important summary for search engines. When someone is looking for information online, Google will use the pages with lists and subheadings to give the reader the points they are looking for, and it ranks that page at the top for easier finding. Remember to include the keywords you want to rank in the headers.
3. Media and Appropriate Tags
Plain text makes your content not only boring but hard to read. Media makes your pages more appealing and improves user experience. For example, you can use an explainer video to give details of the procedure which is hard to understand. Charts, graphs, and presentations can also simplify the content and make it easy to find the right statistics people need.
Images are also important in all your posts. At least, they make the customer understand what you are talking about in the post or product page. By improving the user experience, you also improve your ranking on SERPs. Remember to include appropriate tags to describe what is on the image or media file for search engines to rank your page for appropriate keywords.
4. Work on Your Links
Linking your site appropriately improves user experience as well as your SEO score. Google uses links to find related pages on the internet and passes on SEO juice to relevant web pages. Internal links on your site make navigation easier and allow Google bots to rank interlinked pages.
Adding external links to your content adds credibility to your content as it proves that you have researched the content well and have facts at hand. Inbound links come from various pages on the internet, directing traffic to your website. Search engines treat inbound links as content sources, and they know people trust your site to recommend to their readers, and you get better rankings for that.
While you can easily create internal and external links while creating content on your site, you need a Cannabis SEO Backlinks to help you build follow links to boost your rankings. The old methods of spamming blogs and forums will only ruin your site when people start posting spammy links alongside yours.
5. Focus on Mobile Users
If you thought that only desktop and laptop owners visit your websites, you could not be more wrong. If you checked your Analytics dashboard, you would find there are many mobile users reading content on your site. Statistics show that 60% of searches on Google come from mobile users.
Mobile users should come into your mind first when creating websites. Google checks if your website is mobile-ready. Sites that make it hard to navigate on mobile phones are frustrating, and Google will rightly lower your ranking even if you have high-quality content.
6. Improve Your Site Loading Speed
Site load speed is one of the factors that affect user experience. When people visit your site, they expect to spend the minimum time possible. If the site takes a long time to load, people will abandon it and go to another blog. This makes the bounce rate go high and user retention low.
Although Google does not use the bounce rate to rank websites, it can detect when websites have a poor user experience. When it finds out that your site is slow, it can lower your ranking to help search engine users find appropriate content faster. You can use Google Insights to check if your web page load speed is fast enough.
7. Remember Meta Description
While you can start your content from wherever you think is right, your meta description of the page needs more attention. The section contains the few words that show up below the title on the SERPs. Meta descriptions should include your keywords and be optimised for click-throughs.
If you are creating your website on plain HTML templates, you will have to include the meta description on the header part of the web page. For content publishing software like WordPress, you can use SEO tools like Yoast! SEO. The plugins help you to optimise meta descriptions for SEO keyword ranking.
8. Create a Mobile App
You probably think that creating a mobile app is unnecessary for your business. However, Google uses the best-rated apps on the Play Store or App Store to recommend services to people searching on the internet.
For whatever services you run, you can create and upload a mobile app to quickly access your services. Google will also recommend the app, and, basically, the website, to your prospects. When they see your app listed at the top of the search engine, they will want to check your website for more information.
9. Create a Google My Business Page
Google helps local businesses to rank in their towns. With the Google Business page, your business will get high rankings and recommendations from Google for looking for information locally. It is a great aspect of SEO you need to employ, especially if you run a local store.
10. Fix Site Crawl Errors
There are various reasons why Google can fail to crawl your site. Using WordPress, you might have mistakenly ticked a box asking you to discourage search engines ranking your website under settings. While you can safely use the feature in the initial days of setting up the website to avoid ranking random text, you should disable it immediately when the site goes live.
Sometimes, corrupt sitemaps can cause a problem, and Google fails to find all your pages. However, if you move your site from one host to another or switch platforms, your content addresses may change. Most of the links you had ranked become unavailable, and search engines will drop them.
You should perform an audit and fix any broken links. If the content addresses have changed, apply a 301 redirect to tell search engines that the pages have moved permanently to apply the ranking to the new web addresses.
Summing Up
SEO is one of the most useful assets of marketing. Ranking your site helps to build your credibility and attract more customers. However, some people complain that SEO does not work for them no matter how hard they work. Finding the culprit and fixing it will help you to boost your SEO ranking on any website. The more you work on your site, the better your rankings will be.
