What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential tactic for brands that want to drive website traffic and grow their online visibility. SEO is an approach that uses organic methods to appear in search results. Jason Barnard (Semrush, 2020) describes SEO as “The art and science of persuading search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.”
What Are Some SEO Techniques To Optimise Organic Traffic?
1. Keywords – commonly searched phrases are crucial for determining your website’s ranking, use the right amount of keywords in the right places and your site will rank higher.
2. Metadata – search engines “crawl” through site looking for information, first the URL, then the meta titles and descriptions as well as alt tags for images.
3. Link-building – other website articles linking to your site creates ‘backlinks’, which gives your site authority by being linked to other reliable domains and directs traffic to your website.
4. Wider technical SEO – your website’s UX needs to be accessible as over 50% of online traffic is now mobile (WordStream, 2021). Site speed and technical structure of your site will affect its SEO.
What Are Some Tips To Apply to My SEO Strategy In 2021?
- Write for humans first and search engines second – your priority is to write for your audience and provide them with what they are looking for, therefore focus on engaging and valuable content.
- Use targeted keywords in all the right places – do your keyword research and identify broad searches and your ‘seed’ keywords. Also study your competitors to find keyword ‘gaps’ and include them in your metadata and anchor text for your links.
- Focus on user experience (UX) – Easy navigation will make the user more likely to improve SEO for your site, so make sure to clean up things like dead links, error pages and messy site structures. This is also important for Google to crawl for content and determine SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) ranking.
- Focus on building relevant links – Links are a key ranking factor, backlinks to your site will crawl through content and will judge how relevant your content is to their search query. This applies to internal linking as well to other pages in your site where necessary. Link building strategy can make an impact to your business within one to three months (WordStream, 2021).
- Format content for Featured Snippets) – This is highlighted text from sites that appear at the top of the pages for most searched queries. This helps SERPs turn into raising brand awareness, hence more clicks.
- Remove anything that slows down your site – Technical specifications, accessibility and site speed as mentioned before are so important for UX and the site’s overall smoothness, i.e. clean code, updated plug-ins, optimized and compressed images etc.
- Pay attention to Google algorithm updates – Regular search engine core updates and tweaks are constantly influencing algorithms, therefore keeping updated is a necessity. Subscribing to industry websites and forums will help you keep track of impending or recent updates; Google’s Search Console Community is a good start and regularly keep track of your site’s traffic using Google Analytics to see where updates may have occurred.
- Improve existing content & add missing subtopics – Constantly updating and improving your site’s content with keywords, backlinks and readability are ongoing tasks. There are always ways to improve as there is no finish line to SEO strategy.