Alex Quin is CMO of award-winning Digital Marketing firmUADV.He is a full-stack marketing expert, global keynote speaker & podcast host.
Advanced SEO strategies have made it easier to target a specific audience and generate more leads from the internet to your business. To stay ahead of your competition, you need to be improving and adapting your website's SEO campaign every year. Here are seven ways you can improve your search engine optimization strategy and rankings for 2022:
Optimize your website.
The first thing to focus on is your page load speeds. How long does it take your site to load on both desktop and mobile? According to Portent, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time.
Responsiveness, user interface and user experience play a role in determining how long a visitor will spend on your website. Basically, the easier it is to navigate your website, the more responsive it is and the clearer its content, the likelier you are to attract traffic, retain visitors and rank on page results.
Three tips to optimize your website:
• Eliminate unnecessary code and scripts.
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• Replace clunky and cluttered designs with clean, web-optimized images.
• Use content formats that make your webpage easily scannable.
Target accurate keywords.
Keywords are words and phrases that are relevant to a customer's search query. For example, a customer who wants to buy an affordable car may either type "best car deals" or "what is the best car to buy on a budget?" But more than just including keywords in your content, you want to use the right specific keywords.
For example, the keyword "car dealer" may bring you results. However, "best car dealer in Miami" will catch the attention of anyone who fits the mentioned criteria. So when doing keyword research, ensure that you understand who your target market is, what their needs are and how they communicate those needs.
Social media forums like Reddit and Quora that discuss the problems your business is trying to solve are also excellent sources of keywords and phrases. How? Well, these sites contain question-based, long-tail keywords, which are usually less competitive than traditional keywords with high keyword difficulties. A good example would be ranking for "what is the best portable laptop for university?" instead of just "laptop."
Create longer, better content.
Content is the lifeblood of any online page. Many people visit your website because your headline piqued their curiosity, but it's the quality of your content that convinces them to return.Excellent content is relevant, well formatted (easy to read), engaging and written using language that is easy to digest.
A few tips to upgrade blog content:
• Headers make your articles easier to scan. Also, dividing your content into well-labeled sections makes it easy for readers to quickly locate the info they need.
• Articles are standard forms of content, but they are neither the only examples nor the most effective. A lot of the time, a video may be a more efficient way to communicate. Custom branded infographics are essential to add in your articles.
• It is a good idea to revisit your old content and see how you can use your new insights to revamp them, whether it's a repositioning of keywords, updating ideas or a more efficient format choice.
Track your website traffic.
Website traffic is the number of visits and engagement your website receives. For instance, knowing which posts are successful tells you what works. Knowing which posts don't perform is an opportunity to experiment.
Google Analytics is a prime example of a tool for tracking traffic. It offers a variety of user inputs to track. For instance, the amount of detail it offers allows you to track a customer's exact journey through your site. You can also see the keywords that your site's pages rank for.
Start link-building.
Links are connections between web pages. When a website connects to yours, the link is called a backlink. The more backlinks your website has, the higher it will rank on Google. However, because there is a lot of spam and untrustworthy information on the internet, Google doesn't rank all links equally. It is also possible for sites to classify the links they use as reputable, not reputable or sponsored.
Here are some link-building tips:
• You can use Ahref's Backlink Checker to see all the pages that link to a top-ranking page on Google and reach out to their editing team to propose your content as a better alternative to link to.
• You can also connect pages within your website, called internal links. Internal links can help you boost the SEO of a particular page if many pages on your site link to it.
• Dead links are links that are no longer active and return error messages when you click on them. Having too many of these on your site can reduce the quality of experience and give you a bad reputation.
Stay away from black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO is a term that refers to practices that hack SEO techniques to improve a page's ranking without any improvements to the website or web content. An example is overusing keywords so a page can rank.
Set up a Google My Business profile.
It is beneficial for online businesses with physical stores or brick-and-mortar businesses with an online presence to have an optimized Google My Business profile. For example, if you run a jewelry store and a customer close to your location searches for the phrase "necklace store," your business will come up among the search results if the keywords fit.
You can also add posts, such as sales offers, interact with clients and ask customers to leave reviews of your business.
Conclusion
SEO is a valuable tool for dissolving the barriers between you and your customers while using techniques that make the most of Google's algorithms. The insight I shared above will hopefully help you cover the fundamentals to improve your SEO campaign in 2022.
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