1. Improve your website content –
Adding relevant keywords to your website is a great way to improve your SEO. By adding keywords that match what your customers are searching for you can gain an edge over your competition and improve your SEO. A great way to find relevant keywords can be found in this video.
Far too often, websites lack substantial content that users crave. Try expanding on ideas and filling in any gaps in your content. Long-form posts are the best for SEO as Google prefers longer pages that dive deep into a subject and can best answer a user’s questions. Try not to fill in random keywords in your posts as Google can penalize you for “keyword stuffing”.
2. Update old blog posts or links
Go back and review older posts on your website. Often, you can update them with little effort to make them more current. Google likes it when you update content as well. Updating content provides you with a good time to share it as well on social networks.
Check your links to make sure that they work properly and link to the correct HTTP or HTTPS (SSL preferred) version of your website. Having broken links on your website is bad and Google will penalize you for that as well.
Take Advantage of Google Image Searches
3. Add Alt Tags to Images
Google Images is the second most popular search platform behind only Google.
Google Images accounts for over 20% of all searches online. Image courtesy of https://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-retains-more-than-90-of-market-share-2018-4
Capitalize on this by adding relevant search data and tagging to your images. Adding alt tags to your images improves the searchability of your images which millions of people use every day to find products. Be sure to add information like product type, color, and details that include what the photo’s subject is or the emotion it conveys and how it relates to your brand or business.
Adding Reviews is Essential for Local Search Optimization
4. Get More Google Reviews
Perhaps the most important factor for local SEO and improving your Google ranking is having ample Google reviews about your business. Your customers tell the best story about your brand so let them shine!
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Another important element of Google reviews is that they impact your Google Maps ranking. In 2017, it was found that Google reviews had the second biggest impact on business maps listing rankings. This means that Google reviews which contain users search queries, or relevant keywords, result in higher Google Maps rankings. Google likes businesses that have many reviews from customers and will give you an SEO boost for having them. Be sure to make it easy for customers to get give you Google reviews about your business.
Employing these tips can help you improve your traffic
5. Improve your contact page with physical local location information
You contact page should have all the ways that your customers can reach you but should also have old-fashioned directions with local businesses and even street routes. This tip helps Google to better know that you are a real local business in the area.
Bonus: using terms like “near me” or “nearby” can be a good idea as well. Follow step 8 here to place these words at the domain level.
A Mobile-friendly Site Greatly Increases Google Rankings
6. Have a good mobile-friendly website
Mobile-friendly usability is very important in the eyes of Google. So much so that Google has made most websites mobile-indexed first. This means that if your site is not optimized for mobile then you could have an SEO problem and it is time to update. More and more people use smartphones to go online. Often, a website will be primarily visited by mobile devices over desktop pcs nowadays. Making your website mobile-friendly is essential.
Bonus points if you can add AMP to your website. Originally, Google was said to have weighed AMP more but that seems to have been debunked at this point. It is still a good idea to consider it if you can. Plugins can make it easy to do if you have a WordPress site also using the Yoast plugin. https://yoast.com/setting-up-wordpress-for-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages/
7. Have a content plan for your website
Creating consistent content can be difficult and having a plan can help a lot. Plan out your content over the month or even for a few months. This makes it easier to create content and focus on your website sales funnel.
A good tip is to go to the website Quora.com and look up your industry or services to see what are the popular questions people are asking. Then, write blog posts or create web pages to answer those questions related to your industry. Over time, this will help with your SEO because it will be highly targeted content with relevant long-tail keywords people are searching for.
Here is a helpful quote to spark your content creation:
Once a task is just begun
Never leave it till it’s done
Be the labor great or small
Do it well or not at all
A Tried and True SEO Technique: Improve Site URLs
8. Update your URLs to include relevant keywords
Google still uses URLs to evaluate ranking. Make sure that you have good page structure with relevant URLs that match what each page is all about. This helps Google to give you a better Google ranking. Site structure is very important as well. By updating your ending URLs of articles to things that are more relevant you can get an SEO boost from Google. It’s an old-school way to SEO things but it seems to still work. Creating SEO-friendly URLs makes search engine crawlers have an easier time identifying your content to your site pages.
Which one would you rather click? Having SEO-friendly URLs is important for users to drive more traffic to your site.
Add Your Website To Google Services
9. Add your website to Google Search Console
Be sure to add your website to Google Search Console. GSC is a powerful interface to find important data about how your customers interact with your website. You can use GSC to see what search queries users type in to find your business.
Bonus: submit your sitemaps and robots.txt to GSC. This is a more advanced step but is entirely possible to do with a little research.
10. Add Google Analytics to your website
Adding Google Analytics to your website can increase page loading times, because of this, Google is said to give a small SEO benefit to websites that use Google Analytics. The real advantage to adding it to your website is the power that it unlocks. It allows you to see details on users that visit your website and even find which pages are performing well or underperforming. From here, you can make improvements to your pages and improve your SEO.
Get Your SEO Score Now & Improve Your SEO
Bonus: purchase a plan from SEMrush or click here to get a free SEO report from SEMrush and begin tracking your SEO score with recommendations on ways to improve. For advanced SEO, contact us and see our affordable plans if you are in Columbus Ohio.
Enjoy this article or have a question? Leave a comment below or connect with us on social, we usually post interesting stuff too!
PS. For added SEO benefits, check back to see our upcoming post about how to improve your Google Business listing.
[…] Ted Bigham discusses how strategies such as improving website content, updating old blog posts or links and adding alt tags to images, can boost your SEO efforts. […]
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