What Really Matters with Website SEO
In the early days of the Internet, the “if you build it they will come” philosophy was pretty accurate. There wasn’t a lot of competition and simply making a website would gain you visibility, but in the last 30 years, things have drastically changed. There are now nearly 2 billion websites, with 400 million of those active, and 280 new websites launched every minute. “Google” is now a verb in Webster’s and 93% of all web traffic starts with a search engine.
So, how do you get your site noticed in this new wild west? While this answer will vary based on your site and audience, search engine optimization, or SEO, is one tactic that every site can benefit from. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps your website rank higher in organic search results (not to be confused with its paid advertising brother, search engine marketing, aka pay per click). How does SEO help? Well, page one of search results gets 95% of all search traffic, and SEO helps you get there. With such tough competition, it’s no surprise that there are entire agencies dedicated to SEO, and here at Merrygood all of our websites are designed with an SEO strategy to help our clients get noticed. However, there are some best practices that you can implement on your own or with a web developer to ensure that your site is search engine friendly.
1. Identify your keywords
Keywords or keyword phrases are the relevant terms people are searching for on engines like Google or Yahoo. An SEO specialist can help you identify relevant search terms that have less competition, meaning you’ll be able to get to page one faster than you would with a search term that has a lot of competition. You can also try this on your own using Google’s Keyword Planner.
2. Optimize your content
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you can incorporate them into your site content. You may need to work with a developer to do this, if your site doesn't have editing capabilities. There are two main places to do this:
Headlines
Headlines are considered key indicators for a page’s content by search engines, so adding keywords to your headlines is a great first step. However you still want your site to be user friendly, so you want your headlines to sound natural, too. It’s a delicate balance.
Make sure your main headline on each page is tagged as the H1. Since there should only be one H1 per page, which is considered a priority to Google, be sure to include your keywords.
Meta Descriptions
Make sure to include keywords on every page’s meta description, which is the 155 character page description that search engines also use to determine if your page is relevant for a search. This is typically available on the backend of a website, so you may need a developer’s hlp if you don’t have access.
Since these descriptions show up on the search results, you want them to be clear and make sense to the end user as well so they will click on them. The more times your page is clicked on in a search result, the “better” it’s considered by the search engine, which will also help your site’s ranking.
3. Develop an ongoing content strategy
Once your site content and meta descriptions are optimized for search engines, now consider tactics to expand the content of your website, which will give you more opportunities to include more keywords. A blog is a great way to do this. Brainstorm content that naturally incorporates your list of keywords. Again, this is a balance because you want the keywords in there so people can find you, but you want your page to make sense to them once they’re on it.
The Long Game
While these steps are a good start, this is only scratching the SEO surface. It’s also important to note that SEO is a long game, and even with a SEO partner it will take months before you start seeing results. However, search engines are not going away, so it’s an investment worth making. Interested in learning more about how we build websites with SEO in mind? We’d love to talk!