Organically ranking your webpages may seem like a daunting task. How do you know what you should focus on? Should you write new copy for your website? Should you worry about backlinks? What about long-tail keywords?
Search engine optimization is a digital strategy that is constantly evolving as Google and other search engines change their algorithms to serve up the best content based on someone’s search terms. Not only do you have to worry about how someone may type in search terms, but you need to be thinking about how someone may utilize voice-to-text for searching online.
Here are a few components to keep in mind when focusing on SEO.
Content is king. If you haven’t updated your website in the past 6 months, you should. Search engines, especially Google, love fresh, new content. Content marketing is a strategy where you can focus on creating and distributing industry-related, relevant, and branded content that attracts new audiences.
Should you start writing content just to have new or more content? It’s best to take a strategic approach to your content development. First, you should start with a content marketing strategy plan. In this plan, evaluate what type of visitors you’d like to attract to your website and focus on speaking to them. Strategic content can drive profitable customer action. And a strong content strategy will aid in keeping your marketing funnel full.
Keywords. If you’ve developed your strategic content marketing plan and are ready to execute it, then you’re ready to dive into what keywords you should focus on. Keyword research is crucial in improving your SEO ranking.
There are several tools available to help with keyword research – like Google Suggest, Moz, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest. Google Suggest helps you figure out what others search for with partial keywords. This will help you narrow down the focus of keywords. Then use a tool like Moz to investigate new and related keywords you may have missed.
On-page SEO. Now that you have your keywords and content – it’s time to review that content and optimize it for the keywords you want to focus on. On-page SEO is the exercise of improving keywords in content on individual web pages so your website can rank higher and earn better, targeted traffic in search engines. On-page SEO focuses on the content and HTML code of a page that can be improved versus off-page SEO which focuses on linking to other external websites.
There are tools out there to help identify areas of improvement for on-page SEO. If you utilize WordPress, there's a handy plug-in called Yoast SEO. It helps identify where your keyword or keyphrase may be too far down in copy to make the content relevant for search engines, along with catching the frequency in which you use the keyword. Google likes it when you use the keyword or keyphrase approximately 5 times. The Yoast SEO plug-in also helps identify technical SEO opportunities, but we'll talk about technical SEO soon.
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