Once you’ve determined the sources of your website’s issues, it’s time to overhaul your SEO before the problems proliferate. You want to apply measures that will boost your rankings on search engines. Fortunately, there are several ways you can resurrect your website from the depths of obscurity. It can take a fair amount of work to improve your site’s SEO, but it will be worth the increase in overall traffic and sales leads. Let’s dive into the methods of overhauling your SEO.
How to Overhaul Your SEO
We learned how to discover where your website’s problems exist in our last blog, Overhauling Your SEO (Part 1 of 2): Uncovering the Issues. Your first step should be to examine the data of your website through Google Analytics or another website analysis service. You want to find the pages that aren’t generating traffic or conversions. Once you isolate those pages, you can go about reconfiguring the SEO.
Optimize Your Keywords
Keywords are an exact phrase you’re looking to match on a search engine. Nowadays, the more niche your phrase, the more targeted traffic you’ll generate. These are known as long-tail keywords. The purpose of being specific is that the broader your keyword (i.e., “apple juice”), the more competition you’ll face. Instead, optimize your keyword by being descriptive (i.e., “preservative-free apple juice with no added sugar”) to avoid competing against popular e-commerce sites. This is crucial to attracting a targeted audience who’s more likely to engage with your services.
Building Links with SEO
Google’s algorithm heavily favors outbound links and backlinks when ranking websites. An incoming hyperlink from another website – known as backlinks – is a testament to your industry expertise and is a factor ingrained in SEO formulas. A great method of generating backlinks for your website is social media. Specifically, linking to your blog is a way of creating engaging posts on your social media page. For outbound links, direct users to pages that are of high quality and relevance. If you’re unsure of where to start, link to your social media and review pages.
Increasing the Quality of Content
Expanding the content of your pages increases the likelihood of backlinks and is also a factor of Google’s ranking formula. If the pages receiving the least hits contain preliminary sales pitches rather than meaningful content, search engines will decrease your page’s ranking due to insufficient or irrelevant information. Ways to boost SEO for your business blogs include:
- Expanding Meaningful Content: Google docks pages that don’t meet a minimal word count. Yoast recommends a minimum of 300 words.
- Add Content Through Blogs: Blogs are a great source of lead generation by targeting keywords and adding new content to your website.
- Add Images and Media: Use embedded images, videos, and audio clips, as they boost your SEO ranking.
Search engine favor websites that are frequently updated with fresh information, as it shows your website is not irrelevant or outdated.
Enhance Meta Content
Meta content is comprised of snippets that describe a page’s content in the source code. These elements – termed “metadata” – are analyzed by search engines to determine what the page’s content is about. The following are some of the factors essential for effective SEO:
- Meta Title: This is the title of the page that appears on search engines. It’s important to give the searcher a general idea of the content behind the link. You want to be brief and click-worthy.
- Meta Description: This is a short blurb that describes the page’s content and is shown beneath the title on search engines. They are essentially used as an elevator pitch to searchers.
- Meta Tags: These are snippets of text that act as short content descriptors. For instance, if your page discusses sportswear, you may attach meta tags such as “streetwear” or “running gear.”
These act as the points of reference for search engines and make it easier for your website to be found during specific searches.
Overhauling your SEO is no simple task, especially for old, large-scale websites, it’s crucial to the success of your business. If your business is experiencing a slowdown due to the pandemic, now would be the time to better your SEO. However, if you find you’re lacking the time to complete the task yourself, we here at Vision Advertising can help with our two decades of experience mastering all forms of online marketing. If you’re unsure of the effectiveness of your SEO, contact us for a consultation.
