Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of your marketing strategy. Ignore it and you’re potentially missing out on getting in front of a segment of possible customers. But if you devote some time and effort to building your search strategy, you can drive increased traffic to your site and make more sales.
After working on their SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) with Anteriad, a non-profit organization management company saw 1,033% increase in click-through rates and a 292% increase in conversions. Whether you’re feeling great about your SEO strategy or think it could stand a little fine-tuning—we’re here to help you with best practices to boost your performance.
Focus on content diversity
Content is king when it comes to SEO. Consistently generating high-quality, timely and industry-relevant content has been and will always be the foundation of any web strategy. But content diversity is also gaining importance for search rankings.
Publishing blogs and press releases is key to your content strategy and building a foundation for your SEO strategy, but diversifying the types of content you produce can set you apart. Publishing videos, infographics and whitepapers can help you stand out from their competition in search results. Having different types of content allows you to show up in additional sections of search engines dedicated to different media like images and videos.
If you aren't sure where to start, consider taking a piece of existing content that already performs well and recreating it in a different format. For example, you might have a how-to blog that you can turn into a step-by-step video guide. Don’t be afraid to get creative—your competitors may not offer the same variety of content.
On-page SEO remains crucial
Your on-page tactics are usually one of the first things you address in an SEO strategy. And it's important to keep up with your on-page practices even as other components gain importance in search performance. Make sure to keep the technical elements in shape to best optimize the content on your site.
Remember to consistently review and improve your metadata, H tags and alt text for your images. These elements help search engines index your page, so making sure you have everything in order is key. Metadata and alt tags let you add descriptions to your pages to help search engines more accurately categorize your content. Using H tags is also best practice as search engines recognize H1-6 headings and subheadings. Try to use high value headers that include your keywords. That way search engines can identify them as important information.
Check in on your page speed
Page speed and load times continue to increase in significance with search algorithms. site load speed, mobile accessibility and overall user experience should be top-of-mind.
Your site load speed is crucial to getting visitors to your site. If it takes too long to load, people will close out of your site and look for information somewhere else. So even if you have exactly what they're looking for they may not stick around to see it. There are several ways you can improve your load times such as reducing unnecessary redirects and resizing images to preferred web sizes.
Mobile accessibility is a big deal. Since a large (and increasing) chunk of users are searching on their cell phones and mobile devices, it's important to optimize with those users in mind. Making your site readable on mobile opens your content up to a wider pool of web visitors by improving their overall user experience.
User experience can make or break your SEO performance. If visitors can't effectively use (or just don’t like using) your site, you’re not going to be able to capitalize on the traffic you're driving through your SEO efforts. And over time that poor site performance will bring your search performance down too.
Optimize with users in mind, not search engines
This one may seem obvious, but you need to design your website flow and create and organize your content for your website visitors. Search engines will notice and reward you. And inversely, you could be doing everything “technically” correctly like using the right keywords and tactics to feed search algorithms—but if you aren't writing with users in mind, they aren't going to want to read your content. And the search engines will notice when people come to your page, they quickly jump off. By focusing on the user first and creating content they want to see you can improve your site’s overall performance.
Write for people first. You’re producing your content for them in the end—so think about them instead of obsessing over trying to feed into search engines.
Next steps
Ready to take your content to the next level and drive more business with Anteriad? Learn more about our search engine marketing and performance marketing solutions and contact us to talk to an expert today.
