Organic search traffic is essential for business growth. This is the reason every business owner wants to achieve higher Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking for their website. It is also the reason why you need to forget all about the black hat techniques that many small business SEO efforts were built on before and shift focus to new content-based tactics and on-page SEO.
Below, we look at the new SEO strategies that the most successful online businesses are using and which you can adopt in order to optimize your website for both humans and each algorithm robots in order to make it into Google’s top 10.
Set up your list of semantic, targeted keywords
As Google continues to change its algorithms in an effort to reduce webspam that it detects in the form of keyword stuffing and low-value backlinks, it is now more important than ever before to ensure that you optimize your keywords.
When creating a good list of keywords that you should use to attract organic traffic, you need to start by building a parallel list of related 4-6 phrases. These keywords provide you with variations on your target phrase without straying too far from the original meaning.
While you could pay for high-level keyword tools, this may not be necessary or practical for small business SEO. Instead, you could choose one or more free tools that help you to compile a quality listing of keywords:
- Google Keyword Planner: Designed for advertising, but can analyze competitor keywords and provide ideas for new keywords.
- KWFinder: By targeting by city, state or country, KWFinder can help research keywords that give better local results.
- Seamrush: This software provides intelligence data including website traffic information, keywords projected Google Ads spend, and other SEO-related data.
- Soovle: A unique keyword research tool that offers keyword suggestions in autocomplete format from a variety of sources besides Google.
Create a website with an SEO-friendly structure
Every website has a structure. The better your site structure is, the higher your chances of ranking in Google’s top 10. The structure of your website could either be highly streamlined and rigorous or a mishmash of disorganized pages. If you take the time to carefully map out the structure of your website, you will be closer to achieving search excellence.
You also need to ensure that your website is accessible to your human audience if they are to continue visiting it and sharing your links. Understand that the human mind appreciates cognitive equilibrium – the ability to piece things together in a logical way, finding what a person is seeking and locating it where they expect it to be.
Obtain diverse and unique anchor texts as well as different keywords
Links are still a powerful ranking factor for search engines. This is because they are heavily reliant on this signal to determine the pages that they show on their results pages. Because of this, they continue to invest in new algorithms that can evaluate links.
In particular, search giant Google is constantly experimenting and testing its results. For this reason, you should work to diversify how you secure links in order to build up a well-rounded profile of backlinks that can withstand the tweaks and adjustments that Google is constantly making.
Place interesting content around your links
If people are to click on links to your website, they need to be surrounded by content that they will find appealing and which will pique their interest. When your links receive lots of clicks from visitors, Google will perceive the information they are seeking as important and will reward your website with a higher ranking. It is a strategy that may not pay instant dividends, but is invaluable in the long term.
On-page optimization results in high rank
On-page SEO refers to the practice of setting up the layout and content of individual web pages for the purpose of ranking higher in Google’s search pages. On-page is the opposite of Off-page SEO, which are instead focused on external signals such as backlinks. On-page search ranking factors can have a major impact on your web page rank if they are properly used and well optimized. The most important of the on-page SEO factors include:
- Page content and heading tags: The position of your website in Google’s results improves if your content has appropriate keywords included naturally. You should also pay attention to keywords within your heading tags.
- Title tags: Title tags describe the page content to both users and search engines
- Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions are short texts within the HTML that describe the website. Always ensure that you use keywords in the Meta description.
- Page URL: This is among the most crucial elements that set your site apart from the competition.
- Image titles and alt text: In the page HTML, these attributes are added to the image tag. Google takes them into account for page ranking.
Rely on SEO experts
Is it possible for you, as a business owner, to carry out your own search engine and web page optimization? Of course, it is. Still, you need to know that the time you take to devote to your website SEO is time that you have to take from some other aspect of running your business. Your time can be better spent doing something else, not to mention that you run the risk of incurring penalties from Google if your optimization is done wrong.
Although learning the basics of search engine optimization may not be difficult, you require the services of an SEO expert who offers local SEO services if you are to take things to the next level. An SEO expert does not need to spend hours trying to learn the tricks of the trade – they are already familiar with them.
Update your blog
It is essential for you to track the long-term traffic received by your blog posts and find ways to improve the numbers and maintain them. If you find that there is a blog category or post type that attracts a lot of organic search traffic, ensure that you visit this section regularly and keep the information fresh and up to date.
Blogs which rank high in the Google search results will bring you regular organic traffic for months and even years and will maintain your status within the top 10 search engine results pages.
Track your results
Tracking the success of your SEO is a step that is often overlooked by many website owners, despite its importance. Google Analytics is the most important tool that webmasters and SEO experts use to gauge visitor numbers and engagement. Most people use GA (Google Analytics) because:
- It is powerful enterprise software
- The standard version is free to use
- Google’s cloud infrastructure allows it to handle large amounts of data
- It has a simple interface
- The data can be used to make informed business decisions
The final point is vital, since the point of high Google ranking is so that your business can sell its products or services. Analysis of the data will help you know how to generate more leads and improve sales.