If you want your website to generate traffic and succeed, you must be visible in the search engine results pages. This is why search engine optimization is crucial for every website, so if you don’t already have an SEO strategy in place, this is your sign to get one going. Has SEO brought you the desired results for those who already are using SEO? Or do you need to rethink your strategy? An effective SEO strategy is necessary if you want to add more organic traffic to your site and rank highly in Google.
If you need help knowing where to begin or need a refresher to adjust your current efforts, check out these helpful tips to help create an effective SEO strategy for your brand or business.
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Coming up with a list of keywords that pertain to your niche is essential. You need to feature the keywords your target audience is searching for because you want to be found within those keywords. If you have a company or business in one area or a few different locations, include your location in your keywords to help you with local SEO. When coming up with keywords, think of all the pages on your website. Every page needs to have an SEO keyword associated with it, and if you have a blog page, every article needs to be optimized as well. One of the best ways to come up with keywords is to use Google Suggest. Start typing a keyword into the search field, and a list of suggestions will appear. These are the ones people are searching for. There are keyword tools available as well, such as Semrush, for you to check out. Once you have a keyword in mind, see who is already ranking for that particular term by typing it into Google, see what comes up, and see who your competitors are.
If you already have a current SEO strategy and are looking to improve it, analyze your organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks so you know where you currently stand and where you can improve. Many SEO tools are available for this, with Google Analytics and Semrush’s Domain Overview tool being two of the most popular.
Your competitors might be obvious or not, so when you analyze your keywords, pay attention to who comes up. If you are doing this by using Google search results, type in a keyword that pertains to your website, and then you can see who comes up on the search engine results page. If you are a local business, be sure to use a local term when doing this so you can figure out who your local competitors are. You want to know who your competitors are so you can analyze what they are doing and do it better. SEMrush’s SEO competitor analysis tool is also helpful in finding and analyzing your competitor’s keywords and how they rank. This can help you determine what keywords to use and how you can use them better than your competitors. While you are at it, utilize Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool to see your competitor’s backlinks. Gathering backlinks plays a huge role in your SEO efforts, so look to see who is linking to your competitors and if they will also link to you. Chances are good, especially if you have better content.
If you want backlinks, especially those that link to your competitors, you need good content. If you’re going to hold your audience’s attention so they don’t take one look at your site and quickly exit, you need good content. As well as visual organization, of course, a clean, well-put-together website will help grab your audience’s attention and will help keep them there. So yes, your website does need to be easy to navigate and visually appealing (well put together), but going deeper than that is your content, what is written on the pages of your website. If the quality stinks, your audience will go elsewhere. If your content is dry or doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter what your website looks like. This is something you need to invest time in. Again, research your competitors, see what they are doing, and improve it. Doing that can give you a better idea of what kind of content you should (and maybe shouldn’t) feature on your website and can help you do it better.
If your site is brand new, you will take some time before you do this step, but analyzing your content is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the curve and rank highly among your competitors. An audit is an excellent way to find opportunities for improvement. Utilizing a tool like Google Analytics can give you the data you need to find and fix problems and improve pages that are not performing well. Discovering a low-performing page allows you to rehash the content and make it better, maybe even re-optimize the page. If that’s not an easy option, you might be able to merge multiple pieces of similar content to one page (i.e., from another similar page that ranks higher), or you might find that deleting the content is your best bet.
All in all, being vigilant and always striving for improvement is crucial for an effective SEO strategy. But let’s face it, doing this isn’t for everyone. That’s why it’s best to leave it up to the experts so you can focus on other things. At Sound Strategies, we are good at what we do and can help you develop your brand and grow your business. If you want to leave it up to the professionals, contact us today for a free consultation.
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