SEO is a super important aspect of any website’s marketing plan. Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the quality & quantity of traffic to your website by continuously improving your site to make it relevant. Implementing a lucrative SEO plan can help improve your website rankings.
If you are a small business owner and are ready to increase your rankings, here are 4 things you can do right now to help you do so. The most important thing to keep in mind is you do not need to do everything all at once. Choosing one or two items and doing them really well will help more than trying to do everything and not effectively doing so.
1. Create Quality Content
Search engines will rank websites with quality content higher than those without it. When creating content for your website, thinking of the user, customer, or visitor first will help you rank. Content can be anything from the text describing your products or services, blog posts, company information, videos, and photos.
Computer learning and artificial intelligence has made it possible for search engines to read everything on a website. Once it indexes each webpage, the search engines will run through their algorithm at time of user search to determine if the website is a great source for the user. By having quality content on your website, you are telling the search engine bots that you are a trusted source in your industry, and they will likely rank you higher.
2. Discover Internal & External Links
External: External linking is when another website links to a page on your website. For example, if you wrote a great blog post about a piece of your industry and an industry leader linked to that blog post from their website, a backlink has been created.
Discovering reputable and quality links to your website can help your brand gain exposure across the web, increase the organic traffic to your site, and show the search engines that you are a trusted source. Before asking for a link to your website, ensure the linking website is quality as well. Links from an untrustworthy website will actually hurt your rankings.
Internal: Internal links are when you like from one page of your website to another page of your website. By creating internal links, you are keeping users on your website, which in turn tells the search engines that you are a trusted source. The longer a user is on your site, the better.
You can easily discover internal links on your own website. The most popular way to complete this is to link blog posts to each other or to your service / product pages.
3. Complete Regular Updates
Keeping your website updated and current will help it rank on search engines. Continuously making updates to the content, targeted keywords, and meta descriptions are necessary for staying relevant. Content that may have been created years ago can easily be refreshed with updated text and images to keep it applicable.
Updating keywords can help new users discover you. If you perform a keyword analysis on your website, you can discover which pages are performing and which need their keywords updated. This is a great opportunity to have new customers or clients find you.
Metadata is essentially data about data. You can tell search engines a small snippet of data that describes what your website pages are about. If you notice pages that are not performing, you might consider updating the metadata. No matter what, completing regular updates on your website will help its rankings.
4. Speed Up Page Load Time
Page speed refers to the amount of time it takes a website page to load once a user initiates it. To help your website rank on search engines, you will want to ensure your page speed is optimized. You can easily test your website’s page speed within Google’s Search Console.
Like everything in today’s world, the faster a page loads, the more likely a user will stay on the website and potentially buy your product or service. According to Google, anything faster than two seconds is great, but they try for a half of second for greatest performance. There are a number of items that can slow down a page speed:
- Large Files, Photos, or Video
- Slow Server
- Not Mobile Friendly Website or Responsive
- Fonts Are Illegible or Not Search Engine Friendly
- And So Much More!
Is Your Website Not Performing?
You may be ready for a new website design that is SEO friendly and optimized for search engine performance. If you have noticed a decrease in website traffic, it may be because your website is doing more harm than good. Performing a website audit and analysis can put light on the areas of greatest opportunity.
SharpFinn Creative is available to audit your current website and offer you a plan to get your business back on track. Our team brings over ten years experience with website development and optimization. Schedule your FREE consultation today and we’ll be in touch soon!