One of the most common questions we get from our clients when we suggest SEO is if it’s the right approach for their business. With the allure of social media marketing and the promise of fast results from pay per click advertising, a lot of them consider SEO too big of an effort to be worth it.
However, search leads are statistically proven to generate more conversions than an outbound lead (when you pursue the customer, instead of the other way around). This is what makes SEO still as popular and in demand as it was in the early 2000s when the acronym was on everyone’s lips.
A lot has changed since SEO has begun, and marketers today don’t have it easy, as search engine algorithms are becoming increasingly complex, the audience expects more, and marketing is just more versed than before.
Whether you are a beginner or you have previous experience with SEO, read on to get some valuable tips on how to optimise for search engines in 2020.
You might also be interested in SEO TIPS WHEN BUILDING A NEW WEBSITE
Target the Right Keywords
You can’t do proper SEO without keyword research. After all, it’s the simplest way to observe the behaviour of your potential customers. Keeping a confident and jovial brand personality is not enough to attract people to you.
If you want more and more traffic to your website, target your audience based on the set of keywords they use most frequently to get to you. Organic traffic is based on certain search queries that you should make sure to include in your content on all the pages on your site.
Of course, if you want to make sure that you will target the right keywords, you need to keep an eye on your website’s stats and check what similar websites are competing for. Targeting the right keywords should revolve around matching the search intent of the user, meaning giving them answers to what they were really looking for.
Write Well-Documented, Engaging Content
The quality of the content you write cannot be bargained as it functions as a good basis for your SEO strategy. You won’t be able to keep readers engaged and willing to interact with your brand in the future if your content is thin or unoriginal. Keeping the level of everything you post at a high quality is crucial in the long run, as it’s the building block of your reputation, expertise, and authoritativeness in your niche.
A fantastic way of gathering ideas for the content on your website is to interact with your audience on social media. It can be a powerful medium for exchanging ideas, receiving feedback, and testing new approaches. Social media might not impact SEO rankings directly, but there is plenty of causality between the two.
Build Links
Link building shouldn’t focus only on getting other websites to link back at you. When you link to relevant pieces of content from similar websites, you create growth opportunities – first of all by providing verified, high-quality information to your readers, and second of all by offering other websites a chance to acknowledge you as well.
Linking to your own content might seem like patting yourself on the back, but Google and the readers can actually benefit from it. Internal linking helps interconnect your content and make it part of something more satisfying. This way, you can push up less visited pages and better control the traffic you are getting.
Optimise for Mobile Devices
Part of being chosen in the top search engine results has to do with how good you are at providing a quality user experience. Mobile users can make up a large part of your organic traffic, and your website should be mobile-friendly at the very least, if not mobile optimised. With every design change you implement on your website, make sure to test it with your mobile phone each time, see how it looks and how it loads.
Google also provides a free testing tool that evaluates how mobile-friendly a web page is, giving you suggestions when changes are welcome.
Add Schema Markup to Your Data
A less known factor that can influence your rankings is adding schema markups to your content. These are extra labels that you can add to your content to help search engine crawlers understand what they are reading.
This is a way of labelling structured data so that it’s clearly defined for search engines. For example, you can add schema markup to a recipe blog post, and search engines will have no doubt that it’s a recipe. The search results will show your page using rich snippets that may contain relevant elements like duration of cooking, pictures, etc.
Rich snippets are meant to shorten the path of the user from their search query to the most relevant answer they can find online at that moment. We encourage you to aim for appearing in the results as a search snippet, and experimenting with schema markups.
Write Relevant Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are easy to overlook when you don’t have a lot of experience with SEO, but editing them to be unique and engaging should become second nature for someone handling the SEO of a website. The meta description is the snippet of text that is shown below your URL title in the search results, giving the user a bit of introductory info that helps them decide if they should click or not.
Take your time to write original, unique descriptions that contain the main keywords of the text. It’s recommended to split test your meta descriptions and title tags, as they influence the CTR (click-through rate) quite a lot.
Improve Your Page Speed
If you have never thought of how fast your website is and how it impacts your results, it’s time to test its speed. It takes as little as 3 seconds of loading before your visitors start losing their interest. Almost half of them will exit the website before it even loads, with 80% of visitors never returning.
You would’ve never thought that slow loading is such a sin in SEO, right? To improve your speed, perform an audit, and see what’s slowing it down. If needed, get a private domain, archive images and files, find technical SEO issues. Make your website fast and it will start doing its job.
Optimise Your Images
In many cases, website owners forget about other types of Google searches besides the most common one that leads to text content. People perform image searches all the time, and you can optimise the graphic elements on your website as well. Search engine crawlers can only interpret text, so having an awesome image to accompany your text is not helpful if you don’t provide written information about it.
Alt texts are image descriptions added to the back of your page, only seen when the images are not loaded or when a visually-impaired user is visiting your website using adapted browser settings.
By adding compelling alt text to your images, you can bring organic traffic to your blog posts, product pages, or any other areas of your website that should hold the visitor’s interest.
Track Your Performance
Finding out what can be improved and what seems to get most clients is something you have to constantly check with an online tool. You can track your results by using the Google suite of products: Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console.
You can easily see how your website is doing based on the ranking factors you are using, allowing you to tweak the underperforming tasks.
Over to You
As you can see, SEO is quite complex, and it takes experience to get fast results and avoid the most common mistakes. If you want to improve your SEO tactics, but don’t have the time or resources to handle it internally, you can always hire an agency to do it for you.
Make your life simple by having SEO experts implement a personalised plan and maintain your growth as a business. We at Australian Internet Advertising focus on getting you the most valuable results: revenue. Our methods bring in valuable leads and generate sales, so don’t waste any time and check our SEO services.
