SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and should be the back born of your business. There is no point of having a blog or a website if it can’t generate visitors who read all the stuff you publish out there. Well, the goal should not be attracting readers only who read and leave the page should be making them stay and get converted into future customers for your products or services.
So the question is …what can you do in order to rank first within the Google’s first page? And the answer is simple, you need to have a well-working SEO strategy in place that will push your site and bring it on the Google surfaces for your target audience to see.
If you don’t know anything about SEO then you need to read 5 reasons why your website won’t survive without SEO strategy and check out a proven and tested working SEO strategy on this blog that many bloggers and digital marketers use to have their websites ranked first in the search engines.
1. Keywords are good for SEO
So here we go with the first step that you should make in order to be successful with the SEO and that is Keywords analysis. Every industry has different Keywords so it is important to research competitive keywords that people in your industry use.
Back in the days getting a list of keywords wasn’t an easy task to do because you would brainstorm for hours to come up with the list but nowadays things have been much simplified.
There are lots of tools that will help you in getting the top keywords in your industry in just a second. The following are the key strategies that will help you get top keywords that are being used within your industry. Develop a buyer persona for your target audience.
Developing a buyer persona will help you think about all the keywords people type mostly in google trying to look for a business like yours and then you will start using those keywords to target them back.
Secondly, develop a keyword template. This might sound like a lot of work that needs be done. But the truth be told, you’ll need to do everything that SEO requires you to do.
With lots of tools for keyword generation, developing a keyword template should be the most fun thing to do and shouldn’t take you a lot of time to do. Try Google Autocomplete, Ubersuggest, keyword shitter for generating right keywords within your industry and also you can try out Quora for the untapped keywords.
Also, the next step after generating the list of keywords is to narrow them down. Google has the tools that will make things easier for you like Google Ads Keyword planner and Keyword Everywhere which is an extension of Chrome. These two will help you get organized and you’ll be good to go.
Lastly, you will choose your target keywords and start using them as much as you can afford.2. Do all the technical SEO
SEO is a continuous process that you need to keep doing over and over until you get better with it or achieve the results you want. And with that being said, SEO should start right away as soon as you launch your site. It’s like raising a baby because you start feeding the baby right away after the baby is born so don’t waste any time.
First things first, install google analytics in your site at the very beginning. This will help you to give you daily and monthly results of your site’s visitors and thiswill help you to come up with the right strategies to even drive more traffic to your site. Mind you, your SEO strategies should drive more traffic to your site and if that is not the case then you will have to change and find a working strategy. Take a look at some of the data that Google analytics gives.
The Google Analytics tool is the most perfect and efficient tool that will give you all the data you need to check your website’s performance. Getting the right data will help you to make the right decisions over time.
Try Yoast SEO plugins for free. If your site is made out of WordPress, then Yoast was made for you. This plugin is available both in free and premium versions in WordPress plugins. I have used it for some time and it was really perfect and it’s a perfect SEO tool for beginners too.This plugin offers guidelines on how to write your article so that Google can easily crawl them.
Additionally, ensure that the Google console is linked to your site and Google analytics. This powerful tool will help you measure your site’s traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results. We have used this tool with Yobrand site and it has given us incredible results. For those who are using a WordPress site, you will need to install a plugin called Monster Insights and do the configurations and later you will need to put your website URL address into google console which will be linked with your website’s URL address.
More also, check your website performance speed. This is because Google favors websites which load very fast and are very responsive. Your website should be easily accessible on all digital platforms ranging from desktop to tablets and mobiles. In fact, try Google Mobile-Friendly Test and this will help you to check if your site is mobile friendly. Having a responsive site contributes much to SEO and may help your site to score high in the SEO rankings. I recently tested our website’s responsiveness on mobile and here is what I got…
I would not recommend something that I don’t believe it. Try it out and see the results you get and then get in touch with me via commentary box or here. Again, try using PageSpeed Insights it also works like magic and will have your website’s pages analyzed and bring you all the data about your website performance in just a minute.
3. Do page by page SEO customization
One of the better ways for having your SEO done right on your website is to have your website’s pages customized to meet the SEO procedures at the very beginning and I am going to show you how to do it.
Firstly, follow the best practices for the URLS and avoid numbered links. If you want your website to rank first on Google’s first page whenever someone searches a keyword that is relevant to your business, then you will have to do this. Make sure that the URL of the website pages is written like this https://www.yobrandgroup.com/seo-strategies/ but not like this https://www.yobrandgroup.com/P=123. In any case, try to avoid numbered links
Secondly, use hyphens within the links not underscores. People confuse symbols when writing links and end up using underscores and in their links instead of the hyphens and this leads to errors whenever someone tries to open that link and Google hate that.
Your link should appear like this https://www.yobrandgroup.com/services/web-development-and-management/ and notice the use of hyphens. If you use the underscores then that link will lead to errors. Try replacing one of the hyphens with underscores and see what you get. It won’t work and the link will show errors.
Furthermore, use meta description which contains your target keywords. What is a meta description? A meta description is a one to two sentences HTML tag that is usually 155 characters long. The meta description is the one you see written below the title when you are searching for something on Google. Check out the example below of Yobrand Group’s meta description.
The meta description should also include your target keyword and in the case above the keyword is Yobrand that is in bold. In addition to that, write title tags that contain the keyword. Google recommends that title tags should contain the keywords and relevant phrases of what the page is about. If you don’t do that then Google will try to generate a title for you and that is really bad and I will tell you why. This is because tags are a great opportunity for you to attract the prospect to click on your article or pages.
Therefore, you should write a clear and concise title tag that will engage your target audience to raise the percentage of your click-through rate but remember to keep title tags under 55 characters long.
Similarly, the use of heading tags. Make sure that you include your keywords in your subheadings on H2, H3 and so on. This will help search engines to know the focus of your article then give it a boost.
More also, publish longer content. Publishing a longer content that is built around your target keywords will help your content to be easily recognized by search engines. For competitive keywords, you will need to publish a content that is above 1500 words and for non-competitive keywords, 300 words would do the job. The longer the content, the higher are the chances of ranking first.
4. Use SEO Audit Tools
Lastly, use the SEO tools like SEO Audit Tool to check how your site is performing on search engines. This tool will analyze your website and give you recommendations of what you need to do to improve your SEO rankings and will also show you where you need to put more effort.
The SEO Audit tool will give you the recommendation of what you need to change and will also check if your site has a responsive mobile and tablet version.
5. Put your SEO to the next level with Link Building Strategy
One of the thing that you need to do is to create content that is worth linking and sharing. The way Google algorithms work is that they craw the content that is linked to many sources so the more sources your work is linked to the better work you’re doing with your SEO strategy.
In addition, Yoast one of the SEO specialists advises people to include internal links and external links in their content. This means that your work should be linked to your earlier posts like the blogs you wrote in the past and also should have the external links linking to other people’s work.
This is like a win-win situation, where if you link to many sources there are chances that your work will have some external writers linking to it also because they will see it as a credible source of information.
Lastly, use competitor analysis tools like Similar Web and Ahrefs, to check out whom your competitors link to and who links back to them. Then list everyone down and try linking your content to them next time around and see what results you get. These tools also show your competitors’ referrals which you can start targeting in your next articles. The Ahrefs is a premium tool but Similar Web is a freemium tool which has the option to upgrade but the free mode is also good enough for you to get started with the basics.
That report is extracted from the Ahrefs which will be showing you a list of sites that can be the potential referrals that exist within your industry.
In a nutshell, try using those SEO strategies and also try using the above SEO audit tools to check how much progress you’re making and what kind of improvements that you need to make for your website or blog to stand out. You and your competitors all want to appear on top of the search engine pages so you need to
go miles to standout.
My next article will be on how to market on Facebook and reach your target audience with zero dollars spent. Come back in a week and check it out!
