Innovation & data-driven digital marketing.
Driving digital traffic is crucial for every single business, no matter what industry you are in.As a consumer, the first thing you typically do when you’re looking to buy something new or are shopping around for a new service is turn to Google. This can pose a challenge, as algorithms for the major search engines are in a state of perpetual change, sometimes tweaked even daily. For marketers it feels like a never-ending battle to show up on page one of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), much less stay there. So how can your business has a fair chance to compete? SEO, SEO, SEO!
Start With a Good Foundation
Successful SEO means ensuring the foundation of your website is designed, built and maintained with best practices to ensure search engines don’t have any technical limitations with indexing or understanding your content. Often times designing and developing a completely new website is not an option. Luckily, there are steps you can take to get back to the basics and ensure your website is set up for SEO success. The best method is to pay attention to both front and back end tactics—and adjust accordingly.
Back End
Tactics for optimizing the back end will be more technical and as the algorithms change, will require frequent attention. For foundational purposes, pay attention to these key items:
- URL length and structure
- Crawl errors
- Image tags
- Title tags and meta data
- Schema markup
Front End
Optimizing the front end will always weigh heavily toward user experience. Search engines want to give searchers the best possible experience; thus they will display websites that do so. When searchers land on your website (whether homepage or landing page), they should easily be able to gather clear information about your business, contact you for more details, know where you are located etc.
Also review and analyze these items:
- Website load speed
- Mobile optimization
- Duplicate content
- Prominent CTAs
Audit Your Site and Content Regularly
Performing an audit is a great way to strategize for new content for your audience as well as update and edit older pieces. Dragon Search Marketing reports 61 percent of consumers say they are more likely to buy from a company that provides custom content. If your audience isn’t resonating with your content, it’s time to make a change!
Site-wide audits are recommended quarterly (or after a major change to your website) to maintain full optimization. It is also recommended to perform ‘mini audits’ at least once a month. Mini audits include making sure content is organized and easily readable, checking for any broken links or contact forms and viewing pages on desktop computers and mobile phones to ensure each piece is mobile friendly.
Freshen Up Your Content
Older content on your website will rate pretty low on SERPs, especially content that hasn’t had many page views. Each time a page on your site gets a “view,” search engine algorithms calculate how similar your content was to what the user searched, how long the user spent on your page and if the user clicked any links on the page. All of those things come together (along with other things) to form your “ranking.” The higher your ranking, the higher you show up on a SERP. Your ultimate goal is to keep your content fresh, useful, relevant and be sure to include links to other pages on your site and your social media pages.
Don’t have time or know where to start for successful SEO? Let us help! The 10x team is experienced in performing complete website audits, taking into account dozens of technical factors influencing your SEO. We monitor them in real time so you don’t have to!