An effective online marketing strategy will generate quality leads for your business. And what better audience is there for your niche than the people already looking for your service on search engines?
That’s where SEO (Search engine optimization) comes in – it helps drive organic search traffic to your website by using the power of almighty search engines. The equation is simple – for any given search query (that’s relevant to your niche), the higher your rank, the better your traffic inflow, and the more chances you have of converting your audience.
Many believe that SEO is a complicated technique that requires years of learning and experience. But the basics of search engine optimization are easy to understand – even a newbie can learn to pay heed to it.
Today, we will explore the best SEO tips for getting higher ranking in search engines, which in turn generate more traffic and improve your conversion rate.
1. Improve the speed of your website
The speed of a page plays a crucial role in determining the SEO ranking of a site on Google and other search engines. Nobody wants to visit a site that takes ages to load a single web page, and search engines are mindful of that.
A web visitor could leave your site if it takes more than 2-seconds to load a page. This is why people, and consequently the search engines, will ignore tedious, slow loading websites.
Therefore, it is essential for you to take some serious steps to improve the overall performance of your site. You can eliminate the elements that can affect your site’s speed. If you are a WordPress site owner, you can remove the ‘unused’ plugins (those plugins that you haven’t used). You can also organize your site’s sidebar by adding only essential information in it. Also, compress the images, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files to improve the UX as well as the conversion rate of your site.
Further optimization is possible by using tools like Google Pagespeed Insights or Pingdom, which will tell you exactly what’s causing your page to load slow and how to improve it.
2. Site Content should be for audience
Websites that positively utilize SEO put their audience first. As a site owner, you need to write unique, informative and relevant blog posts and articles that can quickly attract readers and encourage them to stay longer.
However, many people write blogs by stuffing lots of relevant keywords to manipulate search engines. This is an outdated (and largely counterproductive) approach and may get your site indexed for spamming. Even if it doesn’t, no-one is going to read posts that repeat search queries (read: keywords) with the frequency that’s borderline insane. It will bore your readers to tears and drop your conversions faster than you can say “Lead Generation”.
If you want to generate leads, then provide value first. Help your customers by providing them with relevant information and fulfil their needs before you can prompt them to convert.
3. Create external links to sites with appropriate content
Many SEO experts create external links to other sites with relevant and trusted content pages to gain the potential web customers’ interest. However, some people find it bad because it distracts visitors from your page. That is a myth.
By creating external links to other trusted sites can improve your online presence and encourage search engines to crawl your site on the top of search engine pages. Experts also believe that linking to other reliable blogs can help you get inbound links from them. This can automatically improve the SEO ranking of your site.
4. Create unique and relevant meta description
Meta description is the 160-character length info about your page that’s shown to a person. It needs to be relevant to your site (adding a keyword here is a great start), with just a hint of creative zing to capture the audience’s interest.
However, many site owners create duplicate meta descriptions and then continuously lose their potential web visitors. This happens because Google hates duplicate content and punishes you back if you use duplicate meta descriptions.
If you are a WordPress user, then you can create original meta descriptions for each of your web page using WordPress SEO plugin. You can use Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack plugin.
5. Use easy to read URLs for your site
A site’s URL is often overlooked. “It is basically the web address of a website that you can see on the top of a browser, and no-one pays attention to that. Right?”
Wrong.
A URL that’s comprehensible to the human visitors is also search bot friendly, so try to stick to those parameters while structuring your permalinks. Use of characters, figures and hyphens could increase the complexity of URLs. Instead, you can create simple and easy to read URLs.
6. Sitemap
If you are an SEO expert, then you understand the importance of a Sitemap. It is a vital element of a good SEO practice. Search crawlers can quickly and easily index your site if you have a sitemap.
Make sure your site has a “map” – essentially an index of your entire website listing all the pages and how they link to each other – and submit it to all major search engines. This allows them to index your website and show it when someone looks up a query to which you provide a relevant result.
7. Optimize your Headings and Subheadings
The first thing anyone notices about your content is the Title/ Heading.
It goes without saying that you need to write catchy, awesome headings for your content – something that piques readers’ interest and instantly draws them to your post. But formatting is equally important, more so when you add the relevance it hold for the search bots.
Make sure to add only one H1 tag (and put it only on the post title). This heightens its significance for search bots and readers. With the use of CSS, you can create and stylize your H1 heading with ease.
You can use one or more subheading tags like H2- H4 to make your content look more clean and professional.
8. Create engaging landing pages
A beautifully structured landing page can help you generate leads as well as sales. You should create visually appealing landing pages as it can improve the search engine ranking of your site.
You can also drive web traffic and links by creating high-quality landing pages, along with professional graphics and layouts. It should encourage people to complete a goal – it could be to navigate your website or buy a product or subscribe to your mailing list.
If you are a WordPress user, then you can make a use of Optimizerpress WordPress plugin that can help you create beautiful and SEO-friendly landing pages.
9. Integrate web analytics
Once your SEO goals have been determined, you can search for the best software that can help you record the performances of your site and actions of your web visitors on your site on a regular basis.
Fortunately, there are plenty of reliable tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console that can keep a track on your site’s performance and gives you insights that you can use to improve the web presence of your site across the global market.
10. Create fresh and captivating content
This is what everything revolves around when you are on the internet. You can throw around phrases like inbound marketing and SEO and SEM all day long, but for any of it to be effective, it needs to click with your audience. Quality content that provides value* always clicks with your audience.
* Value may mean anything –information, entertainment, infotainment, products, services, etc.
You’ll receive only if you learn to give first. I am not speaking exclusively about giveaways. I am asking you to think. “What does MY audience want? How can I provide it?”
That’s how it starts.
Conclusion
These are some of the great SEO tips that you must follow if you want to improve the SERP (search engine results page) ranking of your site and get some healthy organic traffic to your website, ready to convert.
Author Bio: I am Jessica Gibson, a passionate blogger and digital marketer, currently employed at PromoCodeClub, a Coupon Website. Apart from writing blogs, I love to explore the world by visiting different places and share my experiences with people.