You created an amazing piece of content for your website, but you’re not getting the views you expected. What do you do? Our digital marketing experts at Nug have a few suggestions for revising your content that will boost your search engine optimization efforts.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a continuously evolving landscape and one that is difficult to master. Here at Nug, we understand the importance of quality SEO practices when it comes to getting your content seen by relevant searchers. With that in mind, our digital marketing staff has put together a brief list of the best SEO practices to increase your website’s ranking.
1. Research Keywords & See What’s Relevant to Searchers
Knowing what keywords lead visitors to your site is vital for quality SEO. When you know what brought users to your site, you can begin tailoring content to those keywords to get those who are clicking through to your website to come back in the future. Understanding what your audience is looking for builds trust and reliability within your brand. It also positions you as an industry leader when you begin to answer questions your consumers didn’t know they had.
2. Create Quality Backlinks
Creating quality backlinks is a very important step in search engine optimization. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a backlink is an incoming link from one webpage to another. The crucial part of creating backlinks to improve your SEO is ensuring that the ones you use are high-quality. In other words, good backlinks come from authoritative sites and are also relevant to the site on which you are linking. It’s far more important to go for quality rather than quantity when it comes to generating backlinks, as low-quality links can actually be harmful for your SEO. By creating valuable backlinks, you increase your organic ranking on search engines and generate what’s known as ‘referral traffic,’ both of which are beneficial to your site’s performance. To start building backlinks of this quality, try writing compelling blog content for your site that others will want to link to or finding similar, relevant blogs to guest write for.
3. Publish Captivating Titles & Descriptions
Catching the attention of readers is crucial, and working hard to create an eye-catching title also grabs the attention of search engine algorithms. Take the keywords you found during your research and insert them into your titles and descriptions to help raise your ranking. The algorithms that crawl your content tend to look for verbiage that relates to the keywords a user would type into a search engine. Your content is more likely to pop up in a searcher’s results if you use the same valuable keywords in both your title and meta description, the preview text under a result that tells searchers what the page is about.
4. Use Keywords Strategically
There are many other ways to strategically use keywords, including mentioning them within the first paragraph of your content and assigning keywords to pages. The more you can naturally use your keywords the better. Just be careful not to “stuff” keywords throughout your content; many algorithms will penalize your site for using this tactic. Strategic keyword usage is all about using keywords in a natural way to provide substance to your content. Stuffing your pages full of the same words repeatedly is not only boring but also produces low-quality content that algorithms skip over – something we all want to avoid!
5. Work on Visual Optimization
Our last suggestion for strong SEO is to ensure your content is also visually appealing. Try adding images, bullet points, or numbered lists to help break up your content. In addition to adding vibrancy to your page, this tactic makes your content readable. Looking at too much text on a digital screen creates eye fatigue. To help combat this, many content creators add visual breaks by separating paragraphs with multiple lines, bolding important information, or inserting multimedia.
Increasing your SEO ranking is no easy feat. We encourage you to reach out to us with your questions at any time. If you’re looking to begin your SEO journey but don’t know where to start, you can receive a complimentary SEO audit from our staff. We’ll help you build a plan from there!