Welcome to our guide for 10 Tips to Improve Your SEO Rankings. In this article, we’ll cover the essential steps you need to take to increase your visibility and make your website optimized for search engine algorithms. From analyzing current performance, improving website usability, leveraging social media, optimizing URLs, and including internal links – we’ll provide all the tools and information you need to get your SEO rankings on the rise.
So let’s get started!
Analyze Your Current SEO Performance
One of the first and most important steps you can take to improve your SEO rankings is to analyze how you are currently doing. Data is king and understanding your data is the most important step in moving the needle. With the use of a tool such as Google Analytics or via an SEO audit service, you can identify any potential areas of improvement, for example:
- Website traffic metrics such as unique users, page views, and time on site.
- Number of organic keywords your website is ranking for.
- Quality of inbound links from other websites.
- Mobile rankings for key pages.
- Bounce rate and click-through-rates (CTR) of organic search results.
- Crawl errors, broken links, and other website issues.
- Page titles and meta descriptions for each page on your website.
- Quality of images on the website including alt text optimization.
- Page speed and website navigation.
- Content freshness and relevance.
- Keyword rankings for important pages and posts.
Once you have identified any issues with your current SEO performance, you can make corrections and ensure that your website is optimized for search. With some advanced tools such as SEMrush or SPYFU, you can even gather competitive metrics and establish targets for your business.
Improve Website Usability
The better the user experience of your website, the higher it will rank in organic search results. Essentially, this is all about the speed of your website and how user friendly your website is. Making sure your website is fast from page and mobile load times is self-explanatory and usually a function of how the website is built. But judging the user experience of your website can be trickier.
A good rule of thumb is to not go too far outside of the box with your website. While I’m sure you want to brand your website and make it unique to you visually and verbally, your website experience should use best practices and norms in functionality. Being too creative with your website experience can inhibit Google’s understanding of your website and thus, lower your SEO rankings.
Another important point is to make each page on your website focuses on just one thing. So, for a services page, you want to tell users your services quickly and efficiently and nothing else. For a contact page, you want a simple, easy-to-use form, basic information about your business and that’s it. It should be extremely clear to users of your website how to navigate and the content they will find in each area of your website.
What is important to improve your website usability is to make sure pages load quickly, content is clear and accessible, and that your website is mobile-friendly.
Now that you have your historical data in hand and have a good website experience, you are well on your way to improving your SEO rankings. These two factors are essential building blocks for what comes next . . .
Additional Actions to Continuously Improve Your SEO Rankings:
Leverage Social Media
Social media can be a powerful tool for SEO. Posting regularly on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram can help you engage with customers and get more people (and Google) to recognize your website. One important point to stress in your social media efforts –be sure to include relevant keywords and phrases in your posts to help search engine crawlers identify your content.
Optimize URLs
Including targeted keywords in URLs is another great way to improve SEO rankings. Make sure that all the URLs on your website are easy to understand and descriptive of the content they are linking to. Remember our rule—every page on your website is about one thing only! This action will help search engine bots better identify and categorize your content, leading to higher ranking in the SERPs.
Include Internal Links
Another important element of SEO is including internal links within your website. An internal link refers to a link from one page on your website to another page on the same website. This helps search engine crawlers to discover and index more content on your website, resulting in better rankings for key pages.
Improve Page Titles & Meta Descriptions
You can improve SEO rankings by making sure the titles and meta descriptions of each page are optimized with keywords and phrases relevant to the topic. These elements of a page can play a significant role in how search engine crawlers view the content and also plays a significant role in driving users to your website. Page titles and meta descriptions are the headlines on Google for your website. The better they are at attracting interest, the more people will come to your website.
Improve Image Optimization
Images are an important part of any website and can be used to improve SEO rankings. Make sure that all images on your website include descriptive alt text, which helps search engine crawlers understand what the image depicts. You should use relevant keywords and phrases in the filenames of images to give them a boost in search engine rankings.
Improve Page Speed & Navigation
Page speed and navigation are two important elements of SEO and while we mentioned before in this article, it is important to continuously evaluate these factors. Improving page load times by minimizing code, compressing images, and using caching techniques is highly important to your overall rankings. Additionally, make sure that navigation across your website is easy to follow and links are always working properly.
By following these tips, you can improve your SEO rankings and get more people to find your website in search engine results. SEO can be daunting as it has many facets, but the rewards are tremendous and over time can become the most important factor in getting customers to your business. If you would like a FREE audit of your website, contact us today at www.wearehatchery.com or call us now at 615-208-5373. Improving visibility, usability, and content optimization can be a boon to your bottom line.
