You can use SEO to maximize your PPC campaigns — for example, a high-ranking page may do even better if you use it as part of PPC advertising, especially if the keyword has a low cost-per-click. Your competitors will likely be investing in SEO, which means you should too. Those who invest heavily in SEO often outrank the competition in search engine results and gain market share. Start by identifying your competitors, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and creating and managing your online reputation.
Then, ensure that your site loads fast and is mobile-friendly, make the best content possible, and focus on providing the best user experience. While many marketing campaigns tend to focus on a defined target audience, SEO can help you attract anyone with intent at a given point in time, no matter what stage of the buying funnel they are in. If you target keywords rather than demographics as you might with PPC or social advertising, you can attract more prospects who may be interested in doing business with you.
Create a list of keywords you would like to rank for. Then, use keyword research tools to expand it. Finally, use competitive research to refine your list by identifying who your competitors are, what keywords they are ranking for and where they have backlinks, and use this information to create a better SEO strategy.
Local searches such as "plumbers near me" are becoming more common. Local SEO strategies can help you attract these searchers who are often ready to buy. Then, start requesting reviews from your clients. Optimize your listings by ensuring that you have the correct name, address and phone number. Another reason SEO is critical is because all the time you put into generating great content and on-page SEO optimization improves the usability of your site.
This creates a seamless and positive customer experience. For instance, when you take steps to make your site responsive, it will make it usable for all your mobile visitors as well as people who visit from a laptop or desktop. Similarly, by increasing your page load speed, you'll reduce your bounce rate and encourage visitors to spend longer on your site. Consumers expect a page to load as quickly as possible with a limit on loading to not creep past three seconds!
T he longer the load time , the higher the bounce rate and the lower your conversions. Coding errors can block search engines entirely, making it impossible for your site to rank, no matter how much time you put into other SEO efforts. Other common areas where search engines can run into problems include:. This content is eligible for CPD points. Avoid: Writing a meta description tag that has no relation to the content on the page. Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".
Filling the description with only keywords. Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the meta description tag. Use unique descriptions for each page Having a different meta description tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain for example, searches using the site: operator.
Avoid: Using a single meta description tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages. Use heading tags to emphasize important text Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document. Imagine you're writing an outline Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.
Avoid: Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page. Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another. Use headings sparingly across the page Use heading tags where it makes sense. Avoid: Excessive use of heading tags on a page.
Very long headings. Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure. Add structured data markup Structured data is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages.
You can mark up many business-relevant entities: Products you're selling Business location Videos about your products or business Opening hours Events listings Recipes Your company logo, and many more See a full list of supported content types.
Check your markup using the Rich Results Test Once you've marked up your content, you can use the Google Rich Results test to make sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation. Avoid: Using invalid markup. Use Data Highlighter and Markup Helper If you want to give structured markup a try without changing the source code of your site, you can use Data Highlighter , which is a tool integrated in Search Console that supports a subset of content types.
Avoid: Changing the source code of your site when you are unsure about implementing markup. Keep track of how your marked up pages are doing The various Rich result reports in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific type of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the past 90 days.
Avoid: Adding markup data which is not visible to users. Creating fake reviews or adding irrelevant markups. Manage your appearance in Google Search results Correct structured data on your pages also makes your page eligible for many special features in Google Search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, and more. Organize your site hierarchy Understand how search engines use URLs Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to crawl and index that content, and to refer users to it.
Navigation is important for search engines The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. Plan your navigation based on your homepage All sites have a home or root page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors.
Using breadcrumb lists A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Create a simple navigational page for users A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Create a naturally flowing hierarchy Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site.
Avoid: Creating complex webs of navigation links, for example, linking every page on your site to every other page. Going overboard with slicing and dicing your content so that it takes twenty clicks to reach from the homepage. Use text for navigation Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site.
Avoid: Having a navigation based entirely on images, or animations. Requiring script or plugin-based event-handling for navigation.
Create a navigational page for users, a sitemap for search engines Include a simple navigational page for your entire site or the most important pages, if you have hundreds or thousands for users. Avoid: Letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links. Creating a navigational page that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject. Show useful pages Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL.
Avoid: Allowing your pages to be indexed in search engines make sure that your web server is configured to give a HTTP status code or—in the case of JavaScript-based sites—include the noindex tag when non-existent pages are requested.
Blocking pages from being crawled through the robots. Providing only a vague message like "Not found", "", or no page at all. Using a design for your pages that isn't consistent with the rest of your site. Simple URLs convey content information Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content.
Use words in URLs URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Choosing generic page names like page1.
Using excessive keywords like baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards. Create a simple directory structure Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Avoid: Having deep nesting of subdirectories like Using directory names that have no relation to the content in them. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs , focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages.
Avoid: Having pages from subdomains and the root directory access the same content, for example, domain. Optimize your content Make your site interesting and useful Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.
Know what your readers want and give it to them Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Write easy-to-read text Users enjoy content that is well written and easy to follow. Avoid: Writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes. Awkward or poorly written content. Embedding text in images and videos for textual content: users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can't read it.
Organize your topics clearly It's always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Avoid: Dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation. Create fresh, unique content New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors. Avoid: Rehashing or even copying existing content that will bring little extra value to users.
Having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site. Optimize content for your users, not search engines Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results. Avoid: Inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users.
Having blocks of text like "frequent misspellings used to reach this page" that add little value for users. Deceptively hiding text from users , but displaying it to search engines.
Act in a way that cultivates user trust Users feel comfortable visiting your site if they feel that it's trustworthy. Make expertise and authoritativeness clear Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increases its quality.
Avoid: Providing insufficient content for the purpose of the page. Avoid distracting advertisements We expect advertisements to be visible. Avoid: Putting distracting advertisements on your pages. Use links wisely Write good link text Link text is the visible text inside a link. Choose descriptive text Write anchor text that provides at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.
Avoid: Writing generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click here". Using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to. Using the page's URL as the anchor text in most cases, although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website's address.
Write concise text Aim for short but descriptive text-usually a few words or a short phrase. Avoid: Writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text.
Format links so they're easy to spot Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Avoid: Using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text. Think about anchor text for internal links too You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.
Avoid: Using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines. Creating unnecessary links that don't help with the user's navigation of the site. Be careful who you link to You can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it.
Combat comment spam with nofollow To tell Google not to follow or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked, set the value of the rel attribute of a link to nofollow or ugc. Automatically add nofollow to comment columns and message boards Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this.
Avoid: Using CSS to display images that you want us to index. Use the alt attribute Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. Use brief but descriptive filenames and alt text Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text are best when they're short, but descriptive. Avoid: Using generic filenames like image1. Writing extremely lengthy filenames. Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences.
Supply alt text when using images as links If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Avoid: Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy. Using only image links for your site's navigation. Help search engines find your images An Image sitemap can provide Googlebot with more information about the images found on your site.
Make your site mobile-friendly The world is mobile today. Choose a mobile strategy There are multiple ways of making your website mobile ready and Google supports different implementation methods : Responsive web design Recommended Dynamic serving Separate URLs After you have created a mobile-ready site, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check if pages on your site meet the criteria for being labeled mobile-friendly on Google Search result pages.
Over , websites use Crazy Egg to improve what's working, fix what isn't and test new ideas. This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.
Skip to content. And if you want to attract them to your site, you need search engine optimization. It can help you build your brand Although branding is often considered a more traditional marketing strategy, while SEO falls firmly into the digital category, the two involve similar steps. And in case you were wondering, it works. If you want to bring more users to your site, SEO is the best way to accomplish this goal.
Consider how traditional ad campaigns operate. Now, consider the various pages that appear in search engine results. Much like traditional ad campaigns, earning one of these spots involving ongoing costs. It boosts your credibility and authority The Internet has drastically changed what the sales process looks like for many businesses. And with SEO optimization, you can become part of that learning process.
This is where the process slows down a bit. So as you work on improving your site, always remember to keep your focus on the user. Optimize your site for the mobile-first index One of the biggest changes in how people browse the Internet over the past few years is the devices with which we access online content.
In the early days of SEO, the only way to access a search engine was on a desktop computer. Tools to improve your keyword research Keyword research is the first step in any successful SEO strategy, and there are several tools designed specifically to help you identify the best possible keywords for your business: Google Keyword Planner Ubersuggest KeywordTool.
Tools to improve off-page optimization Another essential part of SEO is off-page optimization, which primarily involves earning backlinks.
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