So, you have a website running for your business. It might have even cost you money to design. But the big question is – is it really an asset? What your website needs to do is bring you sales, engagements, and boost the popularity of your brand. If it’s not doing that, then it’s not really delivering ROI.
What you need to know is that brushing up your design and adding cool functionalities isn’t what’s going to make your site more relevant and visible. The key is to improve search visibility via SEO and drive more traffic this way. More traffic means more conversions and better awareness. Simply, your website needs to be relevant from the moment that a person visits it. Here is how to gain higher ROI via SEO.
Begin with keywords
The first and an essential step in order to rank high in search engines is to determine the relevant keywords. Think about all the terms related to your industry, products, and services. However, there is more to this than just keyword relevance. There is also search volume, as well as competition. Search volume is basically a rough amount of how many searches a term gets on a monthly basis. The higher the volume, the more prospects will be drawn to your website.
However, consider the fact that your competitors are also targeting the same keywords, so if they manage to establish some very well, it will be hard to compete with them. The best solution is long tail keywords, which are less frequent, but still, have a significant presence when it comes to search traffic. While being less popular, the competition for them is smaller, so you have an opportunity to rank higher if you use them.
Technical SEO
The next step is to take care of various technical factors which determine your website’s optimization. It will be indexed and ranked according to these factors.
You need to take care of semantic markups. There is a lot of coding involved here, but they are essential because they enable machine algorithms to comprehend how the bits of content on your website are related to with each other. You can, for example, inform the algorithm that you’re discussing a particular person, and then underline important information such as where they come from, what they do, and the like.
It is vital that you understand that we are living in the era of mobile phones and that most of the searches now happen on mobile devices. Google itself has introduced a penalty for websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. So it is essential that your website is. It needs to have a responsive framework and load fast, in order for it to seamlessly work on various devices.
Broken links are a major nuisance and a problem that needs to be solved if you want your website to rank high. Search engines, as well as users, don’t appreciate links that lead to non-existing pages, or pages with issues. If you are running a WordPress site, you can easily find broken links with a plugin such as Broken Link Checker.
Do a traffic audit
The traffic that your website gets is its pulse. Otherwise, all your efforts are pretty much for naught. According to local SEO professionals, it is essential that you comprehend your traffic, know where it is coming from, and of course, be aware of how to draw more.
This is where Google Analytics jump in. It is very important that you use it, because it is basically a control center where you can gather all the necessary info. All that you need to do is sign up and sign in, choose your website, and input the necessary details in order to get your tracking code. Then, you can install Google Webmaster Tools, type in your tracking code, and start gathering all the data that you need from your traffic.
It is important that you look at the content that is on your website, and determine which is generating the most traffic, as well as which is doing the opposite. This way, you will know what kind of content you should create more. It’s a very economical solution for both energy and time that you spend during this process. Furthermore, you should find out why the content that has the best performance is drawing that much that much traffic. Is it the title, keyword, topic area, or format?
Final words
After you have done all the necessary research, you will have a clear idea of what your target is. Then it is all just a matter of optimizing your posts, and editing in proper keywords. There are many WP plugins out there, both premium and free, that you can use to audit your content for its SEO efficiency. It is essential that you prioritize your most popular content, and in result, boost the overall ranking for your keywords.
