It’s a competitive online world out there, and companies are fighting tooth and nail to stay ahead of the competition and elevate their standing in the SERPs. While it is important that you focus on your entire digital marketing strategy and employ various digital marketing tools to grow your business, search engine optimization should be at the forefront of your battle plan. Why? Because ranking higher on Google is one of the best ways to build brand visibility and authority, earn the trust of your audience and customers, and support all of your other marketing tactics.
Optimizing your website, content, and all other aspects of your digital presence will not only allow you to reach a global audience, but it will also push you higher in the local search results and allow you to dominate your local market. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the five essential SEO tactics you need to use to elevate your standing in the SERPS and push your business forward.
Produce SEO-driven content
Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash
While a winning SEO strategy has numerous key elements, there is no denying that content is among the most important of all. Content creation is crucial for improving your ranking in the SERPs, but it’s not just about publishing blog posts and long-form articles. After all, content comes in many forms. To start, you’ll want to revise your website copy and optimize it for better indexing and ranking. It’s important that you weave your most relevant keywords into every page on your site to boost its relevance in Google’s eyes, making sure to avoid keyword stuffing.
The same goes for your blog posts and articles, which need to be optimized with the right keywords, meta tags, headings, alt-text, and other SEO elements. What’s more, you need to keep publishing quality content on a regular basis, and consider diversifying your content offering. Aside from articles, consider creating infographics and videos that you easily disseminate on social media and other authority websites to build those quality backlinks.
Improve your site’s user experience
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Over the years, Google has become proficient at gauging the overall user experience on websites, and nowadays it’s an important ranking factor that can make or break your standing in the SERPs. By analyzing those key metrics like the average dwell time, scrolling speed, interactions and engagement, page loading times, and more, Google is able to analyze just how user-friendly your site is and thus place it in the search results accordingly.
While it’s not the only ranking factor, it still plays a big role in your SEO score, which is why you should strive to improve it at all times. You can start by monitoring the aforementioned metrics, and then identify the pain points your website visitors are experiencing. You might find that your website is not loading properly or that it’s too slow, or that your copy and content are simply not engaging enough to keep the customer around. Once you have that information, you can proceed to improve one aspect of your site at a time.
Conduct a technical SEO audit
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
Of course, you can’t hope to reach the top of the SERPs and stay there if you’re not aware of all the areas where your site might be lacking. In other words, there are many things that can go wrong without you knowing that can jeopardize your reputation in Google’s eyes. To avoid getting pushed down the SERP ladder, it’s important to conduct a comprehensive SEO audit that will analyze your entire website and digital presence for any SEO issues.
For example, while your site might have a perfect SEO score for now, your backlink portfolio might be suffering from broken links, or links that are active on spammy websites that are fueling bad SEO juice into your site behind your back. A thorough SEO audit will uncover these and other problems and help you fix them quickly so that you continue to dominate the search results.
Capitalize on local search
Photo by XPS on Unsplash
Nowadays, local search is more important than ever before. Before they reach out to a company, customers will first research it online in order to learn about the brand and its products and decide whether it’s the right choice for their needs. This is your opportunity to become the foremost authority in your local market and attract as many customers as possible, so be sure to optimize your blogs for local search with relevant keywords, talk about relevant local topics and issues, and make sure that all technical information is visible on Google like your work hours, location, prices, and more.
Appeal to the mobile audience
Photo by Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash
Lastly, keep in mind that Google loves websites that are optimized for mobile devices. The goal here is to make websites lighter to load and easier to use across all handheld devices, which is why it’s important that you leverage accelerated mobile pages to make your site scalable and appealing to the rising mobile demographic. In turn, this will elevate your standing in the SERPs and boost your site’s organic traffic.
Wrapping up
Search engine optimization is crucial for long-term business success in the online world. Be sure to implement these tactics to dominate local and global search in 2020 and beyond.
