Improving your website's SEO is a layered process, but here are 5 ways to improve your SEO any website owner can do to boost their website's value in the eyes of a search engine.
1. Have Enough Words on Your Homepage
Your website can't be valuable if it's thin on content. Especially on your homepage! Revisit the verbiage on your homepage, ensure you have somewhere between 600 and 1,000 words on there, and try to make every word count.
Many visitors won't visit your other pages, especially if you haven't given them a good reason to, so make sure that if all they ever saw was your homepage, that you've conveyed all of your core messages as in a balanced manner, meaning you've elaborated, but concisely.
2. Update Your Metadata
Your website contains a lot of backend information that often times isn't visible to your visitors. This information instead shows up as headlines and descriptions on search engines, or simply allows search engines to better understand what your website is all about.
Have someone that knows what they're doing review your website's metadata and ensure these fields are populated, first and foremost, but more specifically, contain useful information that will help users on search engines or the search engines themselves better understand the purpose of your website.
3. Improve Your Website's Load Times
A slow website is frowned upon by both visitors as well as search engines. Increasing your site speed creates a better user experience, and you'll be rewarded for this by your visitors as well as Google, Bing, and other engines. There are dozens of things you can do to improve your website's speed, but a few examples include making sure your images are resized and compressed, and removing bells and whistles, especially if they aren't vital to your website's or business's functionality.
This is especially important on mobile devices, because 60-70% of your website's visitors will likely be visiting you from their cell phones, and mobile versions of sites tend to be slower than desktop versions. Having a website that loads efficiently has other benefits as well, like lower bounce rates, and better conversion. You can read even more about optimizing your website for conversions here if you desire to do so.
4. Check Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools Often
You can do it yourself or have your digital marketing professional do this for you. Either way, there are many tools available on the internet, many of which are free, that can help you diagnose website issues and optimize website performance. These utilities can reveal things you never knew about your website.
They can show you which of your site's pages are actually showing up in search engine results, and which ones are not. They can also run diagnostics on your website and provide you with reports letting you know what aspects of your website could use improvement.
5. Start a Blog
Adding a blog to your website pays dividends, especially in the long run, because having a blog ensures your website gets updated frequently while simultaneously adding beneficial content to your website. Ideally, you're going to want to add a blog post to your site once a week and ensure your blog posts are 600 to 1,000 words long, kind of like the guidelines we mentioned for your homepage. But don't feel bad if you can't post weekly or offer lengthy posts, because some blogging is better than no blogging at all.
Also, make sure the blog posts create value for your users. The information in the posts should be well-written, and useful. Good search engine optimization services should offer this to you as part of their SEO offerings, and having a solid blog on your site will give you a competitive edge, when you compare your web presence to your competitors that don't have a blog.
These suggestions are like SEO 101 and offer a great starting point for search engine optimization. Nailing these 5 elements alone will have a profound effect on your website's health and productivity. Once you've got all of these aspects of SEO squared away, you can explore even more advanced SEO strategies.
We offer all of the above services and more, when it comes to helping businesses improve upon their digital marketing efforts. And SEO is just one branch on the online marketing tree of awesomeness. We also provide pay-per-click marketing services, as well as social media marketing services, for advertisers that want to polish other elements of their business's online presence and generate even more exposure.
We understand that these digital marketing services can be quite technical in nature, and please don't feel bad if some of it doesn't immediately make sense. Feel free to call us, email us, submit a contact form, or schedule a free consultation with us, if you have questions, are wondering which type of online marketing makes the most sense for your website specifically, or just want somebody to elaborate on this stuff in layman's terms. We're happy to help.
Cheers,
-AS
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