Make the most of SEO using these five simple tips
Attracting organic traffic to your website is the 21st century equivalent of striking gold. Unlike digital advertising, organic traffic does not require additional money to get your content in front of people and increase your business leads.
Instead, it requires those responsible for your website to ensure search engine optimization is working in your favor.
To achieve that, there are multiple stages of planning and activity you need to include. Use the following five tips to maximize your organization’s website SEO strategy and potential to attract more organic traffic. To do SEO in 2021, take these five main steps:
- Set goals
- Measure and benchmark to see your progress
- Implement your plans and efforts
- Refocus and begin again
- Set goals
Set SEO website goals and strategize plans
The best way to drive organic traffic to your website is to load it with relevant and valuable content. Having a bank of content on your website allows users to know more about your organization and increases the chance of converting them to a lead.
Leads generated from website traffic, or organic search traffic, are important because they have a 14.6% close rate. Compare that to outbound leads, such as cold-calling, which have a measly 1.7% close rate.
While updating content on your website pages is a best practice to keep your site fresh, it is not enough on its own. A more effective way to drive visitors to your site is through blogging. Blogging has been shown to provide a means for:
- targeting specific keyword terms, those most important to you and your customers
- allowing you to communicate and promote your organization’s news, events and viewpoints
As you set your SEO website goals, there are three main questions you should ask yourself:
- Why am I blogging?
- Who is my audience?
- What, then, based on these ideas, are my goals?
Answering these questions will help you identify a clear SEO strategy to put your content in front of your target audience and increase traffic to your website.
Whether your goal is to get people to download your latest special report or to submit a contact form, having it clearly defined will help deliver better results for your website.
Measure and benchmark your SEO progress with Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service offered by Google to help monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. This tool is useful in helping you understand and improve the rankings of your organization’s website on Google’s search engine.
GSC offers many tools to help your website improve its performance. The most useful of those tools is arguably the Performance Report, which can help increase that valuable organic traffic to your website.
However, there are many tools and insights that GSC offers to track the performance of your website and help you improve it.
There are so many helpful reports in fact, it would be impossible to cover all of it in this blog. However, this guide does a fantastic job of doing a deep dive into GSC’s tools with tutorials on how to set it up, track it and make sense of the data. You can also get expert help with Gavin’s digital team to ensure GSC is working as productively as possible for your site.
Bonus tip: Google ranks pages higher if they have more backlinks to useful resources and if they cover a topic in thorough detail (the average word count of a page 1 result is 1,890 words!).
Here is a summary of other factors that improve site rankings.
Keep content fresh: Implement SEO best practices
Coming up with new content can be challenging. The good news is keeping content fresh doesn’t mean you need to come up with new ideas.
You can leverage opportunities here by identifying older content that can be updated, pruned or directed to newer content.
This can be as simple as looking for blog posts that are outdated and inserting a new lead or disclaimer that includes updates to the blog or including a link to the newer blog within that disclaimer.
Another option is to prune older content by completely removing older blog posts and redirecting their old location to a new blog post. This will reduce the number of blog pages and replace older content with the update.
However, be sure to keep keywords in mind when trimming back older content. An example would be to replace a post called “Top Marketing Tips You Need to Know Right Now” with a new post titled “Top Marketing Tips You Need to Know in 2021”.
Record, review and refocus your SEO efforts
A vital step often skipped by companies is setting up analytics to track the performance of blog posts through their SEO strategy.
This is important because it allows you to record actions taken on the site and to affirm the impact your efforts have on increasing your site’s performance. From that information, you can edit your blog post or other website content further to help you reach your SEO goals.
Through the process of test and control, and by analyzing the data gathered by your website analytics, you will be able to create effective blogs. Here are some business advantages of using analytics to inform your decisions.
While there are many steps in getting your website to rank higher in Google’s search engine, this general outline should provide a jumpstart to reaching your organization’s search engine optimization and website goals.
Stick with it. If your organization is still figuring out how to do SEO, you’re likely to discover it is a marathon, not a sprint.
Gavin’s digital and public relations experts are on standby and ready to help you reach your goals. Contact us today.
