Posted by If you’re making your first steps in the realm of growing your website, search engine optimization (SEO) may seem like a mythical creature. Google uses numerous criteria to rank websites and targeting the correct ones depends on various considerations. How do you choose the right SEO tactics? How do you make the most of them?
The truth of the matter is that proper SEO methods are really worth the effort. In the US alone, 40 to 60 billion searches happen on Google every single month. Of these, only 3.4 percent result in a click on an AdWords (paid) listing. All the other traffic goes to websites that rank organically for relevant keywords.
Do you want to reach the top of the search engine results page (SERP) and benefit from a massive traffic boost/high audience engagement? If so, the following five SEO tactics are ones you should definitely incorporate in your strategy.
Quality, Relevant Content
All other proper SEO methods will fail in the absence of high quality content.
This is a cumulative term that refers to the page texts, articles, videos, infographics, image galleries and other kinds of content featured on your pages.
Content-based marketing is more cost-effective than other approaches and has been known to generate three times as many leads. When it comes to content for SEO purposes, there are a few rules you need to follow.
For optimal results, you have to:
• Choose the right niche topics that fall within your area of expertise
• Make sure your content is original (by doing competition research)
• Incorporate the right keywords relevant to the topic
• Give something valuable to your audience – a thorough overview of the topic, step-by-step guidance, an interview with an expert or simply a highly enjoyable read
Responsiveness and Voice Optimization
Gone are the days of people only accessing websites through a desktop computer.
Today, you have to make sure that your website is user-friendly and properly designed for all kinds of screens.
In the second quarter of 2020, 51.5 percent of all traffic in the world was generated through a mobile device.
What’s even more important – smartphones are changing the way people are searching for information.
You have to make sure your website’s design is responsive – it should adapt to the size of the screen that it’s being viewed on. In addition, optimizing content and pages for voice search will enable you to capture a lot of the traffic generated through such devices.
SEO Tactics of Paramount Importance: Backlinks Still Matter
The term backlink refers to links from other sites pointing to your content. Google views such backlinks as recommendations. In other words, someone considers your online pages good enough to recommend to their own audience.
Backlink creation is still highly relevant.
When trying to create backlinks for your website, however, you should understand a few important things:
• Quality is much more important than quantity
• To help your website grow, backlinks should come from niche, relevant, high authority websites
• Poor quality links from generic directories can actually kill your SEO
• The same applies to paid-for links
There are numerous strategies to generate quality backlinks and you can learn some about the best ones here.
Local Optimization
Anyone who wants to attract local traffic should engage in this kind of SEO. Local optimization is perfect for shops and local businesses that want to grow their audience (and customer base) within the neighborhood.
Local optimization puts emphasis on the types of services you offer and the location of your business.
Some of the most reliable local SEO strategies include the following:
• Featuring your location and relevant location-based keywords in your content
• Add information about your address and the ways people can get in touch with you
• Create Google My Business and Google Maps entries
• Create entries in local directories like Yelp and Foursquare
Focus on Regularly Updating Your Older Pages and Boosting Their Popularity
When working on SEO, using Google Analytics and the Search Console will be imperative. These tools provide a lot of data about the pages visitors enjoy the most and the types of content they want to see.
Based on this information, you can “elevate” the content of older website pages that are starting to lose some of their popularity.
If you choose evergreen topics for your content, chances are that pages will continue doing good in the long-run. Still, revisiting your older content will enable the much better utilization of assets you’ve already put together.
To improve the performance of older texts, try increasing the length of the content, adding some new relevant keywords and doing internal linking to send those pages some juice.
These are just some of the proper SEO tactics that will help you get the job done. You can incorporate many other whitehat approaches in your strategy to get even better outcomes. And remember – proper SEO takes time to work. Be patient, keep on building your online presence and learning more about what your audience wants. Eventually, these efforts will pay off.