The number one goal for any website is to rise as high as you possibly can in online search rankings. For businesses that are just starting out with a new website, getting to the first page of Google can seem like an impossible task. However, if done correctly, you can optimize your site so that it reaches your target audience and brings in loyal customers. Follow these SEO tips in order to optimize your site and get the traffic you need to be successful.
Analytics Are Key
For website owners, it is very important to be aware of how your website is performing. Using analytics, you are given a good visual of exactly how your site is impacting the web. You can use analytics to determine what your target audience is looking for, what your competitors are doing to reach them, and how they are doing it successfully.
The first thing you need to do to start using analytics for your site is to create a Google Analytics account. It’s free to create an account. You simply sign up, add your website URL, pick the category your website falls under, and obtain your tracking ID. For those worries about not knowing how to use analytics, Google has an interactive Analytics Academy that can help you learn about all the tools that Google Analytics has to offer.
Once you’ve gone through the Google Analytics Academy, you’ll be ready to start tracking your site and how visitors interact with it. You can see who visits your page, when they visit, how they found you and what they do once they’re on your site. Insights like this will allow you to make the necessary adjustments to your website. You’ll know which demographic you should be targeting, what time you should post your content every day, and where you should be focusing your marketing efforts.
Optimized Content
Not only should you be frequently creating content on your site but you need to make sure that content is optimized for SEO purposes. Creating quality content is crucial for obtaining and sustaining user engagement on your site. For WordPress sites, you can download the Yoast SEO plugin to help you optimize all of your content. The plugin will give you a green light for pages that exemplify good SEO practices and a red light for the pages that don’t. With this plugin, you’ll know which pages need to be optimized and what you have to do to get that green light.
An area that some website owners often overlook is video marketing. Optimizing the videos on your website is crucial for the speed of your site. Site speed is an important factor because users will leave your page if it is taking too long to load. The more accessible your content is to your users, the better. Consider hosting all of your site’s videos on YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine, behind Google, in regards to the number of search queries. Hosting your videos on YouTube will keep your site running smoothly while helping you gain more traffic at the same time.
Keyword Research
Some site owners today tend to only focus on link building strategies in order to receive traffic to their site. While link building is important, it is not the only way to increase your page rankings. Using anchor text, meta tags and keywords you can optimize your site and create effective content that will help your site rise through the rankings.
Keyword research is crucial for any website and the keywords that you choose to use is a very important decision. Many people make the mistake of thinking that the keywords with the highest search volume are the only keywords you should use. However, trying to rank for keywords with high search volumes can be extremely difficult especially for brand new websites. It is important to use keywords with high search volumes but you should try to use ones that have less competition or lower keyword difficulty. A new website that is only trying to rank for the most popular keywords will not find itself on the number one page of Google anytime soon.
It is a good idea to see which keywords your competitors are using successfully. Use those keywords in your own campaigns in attempt to gain more traction. Use keyword research tools like SEMrush, Brightlocal, and many others to help you develop an effective keyword list that you can use to optimize all the content on your site.
Promote Your Site On Other Sites
An important SEO factor for your website is your domain authority. Popular, established websites will have a much higher domain authority than new websites or brands. Because of this, it is especially important for newer sites, less established sites to promote themselves on other sites that have a high domain authority.
A good way to do this is through guest blogging. You want to guest blog on a site that is relevant to your industry since that means you’ll be exposed to the correct audience. Guest blogging on a site with a high domain authority is good for a few reasons. First off, you create a good relationship with an established brand that has a loyal following. Those followers trust that whatever content is shared on that website is quality information, which will allow them to immediately trust you and possibly turn them into followers of your brand as well. Also, guest blogging is a great opportunity to add quality backlinks for your site, which Google will love.
Update Frequently
Updating your site on a regular basis is crucial for staying relevant in your industry and maintaining high search rankings. This includes continuous implementation of best SEO practices for all of your site’s content and watching out for the latest trends in SEO and digital marketing.
Another big part of keeping your site updating is making sure that older content stays optimized. You should frequently check your site for broken links since they could cause visitors to leave your site and look for a different source of information. Using programs like SEranking, you can perform a site audit on your website. A website audit scans your site and will notify you of any broken links that are currently on your site. This way you can fix the link before it has a negative impact on your page rank or domain authority.
SEO Tips To Rise in the Rankings
While these SEO tips will help guide you in the right direction, there is so much more that goes into search engine optimization. From keyword research to website maintenance, it is a continuous process to optimize your site for success. At Creative Click Media, we specialize in web design and search engine optimization. Our team of digital marketing experts will help put your website on the map. If you need help gaining traffic to your site, contact us today!