Five essential SEO tips to boost your brand’s website traffic
Creating a user-friendly and breathtaking website can help your organization increase sales leads. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great the site is if no one can find it. If you want your target audience to visit your website and take meaningful action to support your business goals, creating an SEO strategy is critical.
SEO is the practice of optimizing and improving an online site to increase its overall visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing, among others. As such, the higher a website ranks, the more organic traffic it gets, attracting new and recurring customers.
Unlike digital advertising, organic traffic does not require additional costs but instead, a successful SEO strategy to get your content in front of your audience. We talked to Sean Mulcahy, director of digital strategy and web services at Gavin, about maximizing an organization’s website exposure.
Here are his top five SEO tips:
1. Build a well-designed website
It’s not just about making SEO improvements but providing the best value. Website design affects user experience, so ensuring it looks updated and clutter-free will encourage visitors to engage, explore and share your content. Poor website designs and slow speeds will lower your SEO rank and discourage people from visiting.
In addition, optimize your website content to include success stories, blogs and testimonials – these actions will appeal to visitors as well as search engines because it positions your website as an answer to potential questions.
2. Pick relevant keywords
SEO keywords are the words or phrases found on your website that allow visitors to find you when they search for those words or phrases. Developing a list of diverse keywords related to your website content can be crucial to making your website stand out.
To successfully pick relevant keywords, you need to know how people are searching to make it easier for them to find your website – poor and irrelevant keywords will guarantee your website lands further down in Google search.
Additionally, SEO keyword research should be an ongoing process because searchable top words evolve, so they need to be reevaluated. For instance, high-volume words or long-tailed keywords could be augmented or shortened.
3. Leverage headings: H1 and H2
Having eye-catching and original content increases website traffic, but you need to attract search engines to do so. Heading tags H1 and H2, which are short for Header 1 and Header 2, like the example below, are scanned by search engines to find relevant content.
H1 tags are essential to SEO success because they help engines understand the website’s content, allowing the engine to rank the site. Each H1 should be concise, descriptive, unique, and relevant and should include primary keywords that your audience can easily read. Include only one per page.
Like H1 tags, H2 tags provide a better user experience by organizing the content as subheaders. However, it’s recommended to use them strategically as too many of them could be read as keyword spam by Google.
4. Prioritize a mobile-friendly experience
With the continued rise of mobile devices, your SEO will become irrelevant if you aren’t creating your SEO strategy with mobile top of mind. Google recognizes this with its mobile-first indexing.
Mobile-first indexing is a Google effort to transition from desktop to mobile content first since most people search from their phones and tablet devices – its Googlebot uses the mobile version of the website content for indexing and ranking.
Make sure your web design is responsive, so it adapts to different sizes and devices without needing additional source codes. Try to have consistent content across all channels and devices, including titles, images, videos, and links. Also, pay attention to page load time, as a faster mobile landing page will most likely put your website in Google’s top 10 results.
5. Evaluate your website
In an ever-evolving digital world, you always need to review your SEO strategy, metrics and online assets to ensure performance is on the right track. This would also allow you to identify problems, errors, successes, and weaknesses.
For instance, revisit your keywords or adjust titles, descriptions or headers. Update your content to remind your audience and search engines about who you are. Keep track of inbound links to make sure they work should you make any significant website changes.
Need to optimize your SEO strategy for your website?
If you’re looking to improve your website presence to increase your organic visibility, contact us today to talk to one of Gavin’s digital and web specialists.
