More than 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. Today’s customer hits the internet first when they’re thinking of making a purchase. As such, winning the search war is the new moment of truth. If you don’t win over the customer’s attention here, you’re bound to lose. It’s no surprise, then, that search engine optimization (SEO) is now a critical need for many firms. The right SEO tips can make your business bloom.
Here is an in-depth look at six critical SEO insights that can help you attract more traffic and ultimately lift your ranking.
1. Create a Memorable User Experience
The user experience (UX) you ship has an impact on your brand and SEO performance.
If a visitor enjoys using your website, and if they can also find a true solution to their problem, your brand will become magnetic. They’ll keep coming back. The more your users keep coming back, the higher your website can rank.
One of the most fundamental aspects of UX is speed. If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you’ll lose 40% of users. At that rate, it’s not hard to see how a slow site can bleed you dry.
You should also format your content in such a way to make it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Anywhere you have a call-to-action, ensure it is clear and speaks to the need at hand.
2. Measure Your Progress
Unless you can tell how you’re performing, you won’t know for a fact if your SEO is working or not. The only thing worse than not having an SEO strategy is executing one blindly.
Thus, one of the best SEO tips you’ll ever get is always to measure your progress.
What you need to track is dependent on your SEO goals. For example, if you’re looking to grow your sales, you will have to keep a watchful eye on your conversion rate.
If you notice visitors are coming to your site but not engaging and leaving soon after, the bounce rate will be your key guide. As long as you tie the metrics you’re tracking to your objective, you’ll be able to determine where you are at any point.
3. Understand Your Target Audience
SEO is an inbound strategy that draws the right kind of users to your website. But how do you determine who are the right users to attract?
You need to develop a detailed buyer persona that helps center your SEO strategy. As you build your buyer persona, you’ll better gauge whether your market research is accurate or if you need to revisit it.
Since your buyer persona will show you who your target audience is and their needs, you can create content that better speaks to their needs. Users will want to visit your website once such targeted content resonates with them.
4. Keyword Research Matters
You can’t dip into a bag of SEO tips and tricks and not touch keyword research. Keywords are as critical to your SEO as oxygen is to a living being.
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your audience will use when looking up information online. A keyword gives you insight into a user’s mind as it reflects the need they are trying to fill.
If you dig into keyword research, you’ll more accurately uncover your target audience’s intent. From there, it will be easier to fashion your content and other SEO efforts towards speaking to this need.
As you look for keywords to leverage, use valuable options that aren’t as competitive. Long-tail keywords (including four or more words) give you more insight into user intent and should be a big part of your SEO.
5. Develop a Quality Linking Strategy
In SEO, links act as an endorsement of your brand. When other websites and online users find your material useful, they will link to it. Essentially, they are telling others that your material is valuable.
Why is this valuable?
Search engines use links as a signal that your website is relevant. The more quality links you earn, pointing back to your website, the more people are paying attention to you. The search engine will then push your site higher up in the results.
While this is valuable, you need to realize that bad links have the opposite effect. A spammy backlink causes you to gain a bad reputation. Earn enough of those, and your website stops being credible, which lowers its ranking.
Thus, you need to inculcate regular link auditing as part of your SEO. That way, you can identify and root out undesired links early to avoid penalization.
6. Always Keep E-A-T in Mind
Earning credibility online is hard, but for those brands that do nurture it, the pay off is big. E-A-T refers to the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness a website generates among users.
When your site demonstrates expertise, users can trust that what you share is backed by in-depth domain experience and who doesn’t value that? You become the expert that users have to listen to.
Being knowledgeable is great but earns very little if you’re not billed as an authority in your field. The more you invest in developing the authoritativeness of your site, the more it reinforces your skills.
Trust is the E-A-T element that ties it all together in a user’s mind. If they believe you have the skills and reputation in your sector, users will trust you. And that’s what leads to them moving from leads to paying customers.
The cherry on the cake is that E-A-T holds water with search engines. In fact, Google is known to discuss E-A-T in its Quality Raters’ guidelines as a factor that influences ranking. The more your E-A-T grows, the better your SEO will perform.
You Need the Right SEO Tips to Survive and Thrive
Search has become the new battleground for businesses looking to grow their market share.
If you can capture customer attention when they’re making the purchase decision, you win more client dollars. To stay in the game, invest in uncovering SEO tips you can execute to boost your results.
EWR Digital is an online marketing agency that focuses on delivering the results you need for your small business. Talk to us today for digital marketing services that will empower you to dominate your competition.