SEO takes considerable effort—you need to know the right tricks to get seen, clicked and mentioned. Here are eight absolute SEO must dos to include in your marketing strategy.
1- Perform an SEO Audit
First and foremost, you need to have a big picture of what is going on with your website. Performing a thorough SEO audit can help to spot strong and weak points in your system. That is the starting point for improving SEO stats.
Here’s a little breakdown of SEO audit steps:
- Crawl the site;
- Analyze search results;
- Check user journeys throughout the website;
- Run through the backlinks, leave the good ones;
- Redirect all variations of the domain to the original;
- Check meta descriptions and tagging;
- Check the uniqueness of the content.
2- Optimize home and landing pages
The goal here is to optimize your key pages and make them strong – i.e. as engaging and attractive for search engines as possible.
- Clean up the metadata—make titles and descriptions to the point and instantly understandable;
- Add keywords for relevance in search results;
- Make the pages consistent in style and user-friendly in experience;
- Fill it with the content with the right messaging to motivate users to consider your brand and raise their hands to be contacted.
More on supercharging your SEO strategy:
3- Find your long-tail keywords
Density and tenacity of the right combinations of keywords define the status and searchability of the page more than anything else.
However, simple keywords are overdone and can barely make any difference. You need to look for long-tail keywords that will perfectly describe your business through the lens of the needs of the target audience.
These will lower cost per click and create more focused site-traffic.
4- Improve User Experience
User experience is one of the top priorities in building any site. Some rules to follow:
- Put yourself into the mindset of the user who just wants to get what he needs otherwise he will go elsewhere;
- Develop persuasive calls-to-action throughout the site;
- Avoid any source of irritation on the landing page where possible, including pop-up teasers;
- Improve navigation.
5- Put a shine on content
Content is the foundation of good SEO. You need to keep all of your content up to date, easy to find and constantly in demand. That means:
- Spice the texts with relevant keywords;
- Keep them unique and accessible;
- Build a grid of links around the site in order to construct a “would you like to know more” narrative.
6- Link building
Another important element of building up a high-ranking website is a credible background. The best way to get it is through link building.
With link-bound anchor texts, you can get a fine boost in search ranking. The elaborate exposure provided by link building also helps to establish a brand’s trustworthiness. It is important to get backlinks on credible and relevant platforms.
How can you make this happen? Delivering guest posts on relevant platforms and providing content that is quoted or mentioned on other sites are both great ways to make this happen.
7- Switch to HTTPS
Internet security is a thing everyone wants to be sure about. A browser takes care of the basics. For this reason, users are often prevented from visiting websites due to their questionable security. In order to avoid that, switch to HTTPS.
Why? Search engines prefer to rank the sites with secure connections higher than the others, and, it boosts customer confidence and, in turn, conversions.
8 – Eliminate technical SEO issues
Tech SEO means improvement of the website crawling by following search engine requirements. This includes various operations regarding site speed and architecture.
Consider URL structure, data markup, redirects, browser cache, breadcrumbs and other essential. The direct result is better positioning in search results by proxy, which always a good thing.
Kim Hailey is a freelance mobile app developer and UX consultant at TheAppSolutions.
Network
