One of the most frequent questions I get from clients is, “How can I improve my SEO ranking or website SEO performance?” In this article, I provide practical tips on how to improve your company’s SEO performance. Additionally, I have included links to some fantastic, free resources you can use to improve your SEO.
Great SEO is the result of achievement. It’s a meritocracy. Search engine algorithms reward you for designing websites and posting highly relevant content that delivers a great user experience (from mobile to desktop to tablet) that is accurate and trustworthy, showcases expertise and authority, and is linked by sources of equal or higher domain authority.
Even my headline above was written to be relevant to how online searches are worded with short and longer-tail keywords, as are my subheads and text below!
10 Tips for Improving SEO
- Keyword Research: One of the easiest and most important steps to improving SEO is to understand what people are searching for and how your website, blog content, and digital PPC advertising can be the answer to those queries. This makes identifying KEYWORDS relevant to your business, products/services, and target audiences and using them in your content. Think of your searchable content as the “answers” to website search queries.
- Content Creation: Providing fresh, high-quality, original content on your website or through your blog regularly is key to improving SEO. It must be relevant and provide value to your target audience and include keywords they are searching for in search queries.
- On-Page Optimization: Ensure your website is optimized for search engines, including putting highly relevant keywords in your titles, meta descriptions, and header and photo tags, as well as body copy. But don’t overstuff. That is called keyword stuffing, and search engines don’t like that. It is spammy.
- Technical SEO: Make sure your website is technically sound, including mobile-friendliness, page speed, and crawlability. Since we live in a mobile-first world, having a mobile-responsive site is a must and gives you better ranking by search engines.
- Backlinks: Backlinks are the holy grail of SEO. Acquire high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to improve your website’s authority. Backlinks (also known as “inbound links” or “incoming links”) are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine ranking.
- Local SEO: Local SEO is where you focus on improving your rankings and visibility in local search results such as Google’s Map Pack. This is different from general organic search. Optimize your website for local search by claiming your Google My Business listing and getting listed in local directories.
- Social Media: Utilize social media to drive traffic to your website and improve your brand’s online visibility. Promote your blog content, event registration, new products and news with a call-to-action that is located on your website. These are all measurable, too, with Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
- User Experience: Improve your website’s user experience by making it easy to navigate, fast to load, visually appealing, without duplicate copy, and without unnecessary redirects or dead redirects. Search engines reward you for doing things right and ding you when you don’t.
- Use Analytics for Optimization: Use analytics tools to track your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two readily available and easy-to-use products that provide lots of ability to customize to your needs.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly review and update your SEO strategy to stay ahead of your competition and improve your search engine ranking. And be sure to continually test and optimize.
Free Resources to Optimize SEO Ranking and SERP Performance
Below are links to the tools included in my 10 tips. There are some additional tools that you will find helpful as well.
- Google Keyword Planner (Google Ads) (https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/) Google’s Keyword Planner gives you timely insight into keywords being used by searchers, their approximate volume, the degree to which they’re being competed for, and price range in the keyword auction market. Even if you do not run any paid AdWords campaigns, you can learn a lot about what and how your audience is searching for topics that may be relevant to your business and the content you develop for your website and social media.
- Moz (https://moz.com) SEO expert Rand Fishkin started Moz and it’s a well-respected site for powerful tools — including backlink analysis tools and site audits — that can help you increase search visibility for your site for free. A subscription plan is available for more advanced users.
- Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/) Another well-respected tool is Ahrefs. It provides an all-in-one suite of tools that can do everything from keyword generation, competitive analysis to auditing your website.
- SEMrush (https://semrush.com) SEMrush is an excellent all-in-one tool suite that provides traffic, usage, competitive data, and backlink analysis. SEMRush also provides site auditing — a recommended step when assessing the competitive strength of your website. Another great way to use SEMRush is to do a keyword “gap” analysis to see where your competitors are winning – or losing – on keywords you’d like to rank for so you can develop content that has a good chance of ranking.
- Ubersuggest (https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/)
SEO expert Neil Patel has created a useful toolbar that plugs right into your Chrome browser that lets you see SEO metrics (keyword volume, usage, price) and suggestions about related keywords you might consider including in your content development to improve search relevancy.
About the Author
I am the founder and president of The Brand Partnership. After working with teams in-house to build digital strategy and execute creatively on those foundational strategies — or working directly with clients to improve their marketing through improved aspects of digital marketing — I decided to get credentialed in digital marketing. Last fall, I received my joint digital certification from the Digital Marketing Institute and American Marketing Association. SEO and website optimization are two areas most clients want to improve, so I have created blogs with tips and resources on this subject matter. I hope you find this article helpful.