If you were to take a look at SEO practices 10, even 5 years ago, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be a different type of marketing. The truth is, SEO Is quite different now. The principles remain the same; you are optimizing your website and other pages for the search engines so that your audience can find you when they need you. However, the industry is always changing and there are different ways of doing this now.
Below, you’ll find 12 SEO tips that you can use to revolutionize your results. These tips are all relevant for 2020, and some could even help you to continue marketing your business during this strange downtime when we have Covid-19 to deal with. Read on to learn more:
1. Write Truly Valuable, Long-Form Content
The content that you choose to put on your blog or anywhere else, should be truly valuable content. This means you need to think about what your audience asks most frequently and what could help them when they are not working with you, but what might make them want to work with you. Long-form content is thought to be better for this than shorter content, but it must be thorough and well written.
2. Make Sure Your Business Information Is Consistent Across The Board
On every single platform you have, whether your website, Facebook, or Google My Business, you have to ensure your business information is consistent. If there are any misspellings, mistakes, or things you haven’t changed over yet, this could cause problems in not only your rankings, but getting people to come to your business.
3. Use The Highest Quality, Original Images
Images can really speak to your audience. Not only that, they enhance posts and the things you may be talking about, as well as illustrate the sort of services and products that your business is offering. Do your best to take your own original images with a high quality camera, but make sure you know how to do this effectively. The image should catch the eye without being misleading. Simply put, if you were selling plain chocolate chip cookies, you wouldn’t take a picture of a fruit and chocolate cookie.
4. Ensure Super Simple Site Navigation
There’s nothing worse than stumbling across a website that looks like it could offer something you need, only to be confused by how the site navigation works. It’s too easy to get lost on certain websites and not be able to find what you’re looking for, which can leave users feeling endlessly frustrated. Make sure you test your site and ask for honest feedback.
5. Don’t Make Your Customer Jump Through Hoops To Order
The last thing you want is for your audience to decide they want to order from you, whether a product or service, only for them to abandon their cart halfway through checking out. This happens more often than you think, and it’s gut wrenching because you think you’ve got them but they pull the rug from under you.
More often than not, they abandon the idea of purchasing from you because it’s too difficult. Don’t force them to put in a mountain of detail if they don’t need to. Allow them to check out quickly and easily.
6. Create Different Types Of Content To Add Value
Videos and podcasts are two modern and effective forms of content your business should be looking at to get better results. You don’t have to spend a fortune, but looking at post production services could help you to refine your offerings.
7. Work With A Company That Can Tailor A Plan For You
Of course, you can’t take care of your entire SEO Plan yourself. If you try to do this, well, you’re going to be frazzled and disappointed. A team such as Unravel SEO would be able to look at your business and tailor a plan for you. You need to focus on what you do best – running your business.
8. Monitor And Analyze Your Results
Monitoring and analyzing your results is so important with ecommerce sites. You should start by identifying broken links and error pages, and then you can analyse what’s working and what’s not. You should also make a note of popular keywords and pages, and address those that are not performing well for organic search.
A/B testing, or split testing, will help you to ensure that what you’re doing is not only working, but the best thing you can possibly do. Changing one small thing at a time may seem like it won’t make a big difference, but with split testing, you might be surprised.
9. Focus On The User Experience
It’s all about the user experience these days. How can you make it clear you’re thinking about them in everything you do?
10. Maximize Your User Engagement
There are some really great ways to maximize your user engagement. Start by simply including highly relevant links and offers on the page. These links should answer your reader’s question, and can help to reduce bounce rates.
LSI keywords can answer any additional questions that your audience may have after first viewing your content. This will add further value and help to retain the person. Images, infographics, text, and video all provide multiple ways for a user to absorb the content, and this will also help to keep them more engaged.
11. Work On Increasing Your Click-Through Rate
See if you can increase your click-through rate for better results. You can do this in a few really simple ways. First, try writing headlines that appeal to your searchers’ emotions. Then, see what ‘power words’ you can use, as these types of words trigger a response and get people to pay attention. A strong meta description on top of those things will help to set your post apart.
12. Continue To Optimize Your Site For SEO Performance
Optimizing your site for SEO should never stop. You can further do this by making sure your site is crawlable by creating an XML sitemap, if you don’t already have one. You should also use tracking on your site so you can see where visitors are dropping. You can also:
- Use structured data to classify your content, this way Google will know exactly what your post is about.
- Compress and optimize images as this will increase the speed of your site.