SEO or search engine optimization is the most effective way to make yourself and your brand visible online. By employing SEO, anyone can get their website rank higher in Google search results. You can use various search terms that help you gain leads and generate more revenue for the business.
Although it isn’t easy to employ an effective SEO strategy, you have to figure it out. Many companies offer WordPress SEO services to help small, medium, and large scale businesses work it out. If you don’t have a big budget, you can go for a DIY approach. Through this article, we will take you through ten steps to build an effective SEO strategy.
Before implementing an SEO strategy, you must ensure that it is compatible enough for your business. Search engines continuously change the way they rank websites to improve the user experience. So, your primary goal while implementing any SEO strategy is to provide an excellent user experience on your website.
Here are ten steps that can help you improve the SEO and make your WordPress website a success:
1. Defining a strategy
Before implementing a long-term strategy, articulate the current status, future goals, and target customers of your website. Start analyzing your products and services and understand ways to promote them effectively.
It is important to note that you improve your Google search rank. However, it is equally important to build a customer base and drive sales too, and you have to set goals for them. An SEO campaign with meaningful actions is critical for your business.
2. Make an optimized website for smartphones
Many people access Google search through mobile phones, and thus it is crucial to make your website responsive to the screen size. Not performing well on mobile can make you lose customers, and Google is likely to demote your ranking to provide a better experience to mobile users. There are plenty of responsive themes available on WordPress that can help you enhance your user experience across a wide range of devices.
3. Keyword Research
You need to know what people search on Google before putting content on your website. You have to make a list of keywords that matter in your industry with high search volumes. Using these keywords, you can optimize the traffic on your website. You can use tools like Google keyword planner and Google trends. It can help you find the opportunities that you might have otherwise missed. You can target the audience that your competitors target by checking out their work process.
4. Research your competitors
Figuring out the strategies of your competitors can help you in many ways. If any other local business is offering the same services as you do, they are your competitors. You can check out their marketing campaigns and the way they make their website gain excess traffic. By performing research, you can get the required elements to formulate a good strategy. It can help you save time by learning from your competitors’ mistakes.
Here is what you can try finding during your analysis:
- What are the right keywords for the industry?
- How are your competitors including keywords in their titles, headings and descriptions?
- How do they use content to boost SEO for the website?
- Which social media platforms have maximum potential leads for your business?
- How much relevant information is present on their website?
- What type of information do they provide to the audience?
- Which pages are crucial for your business, and which ones you can avoid.
- Which ones can drive the most traffic for you?
- Are your competitors on top or bottom of your Google search position?
5. Optimize content to maximize returns
Once you have selected the right keywords and have completed your initial research, look at ways you put them to work on your WordPress website. Create a structured plan for content on the website pages. It is advisable to have 500+ words of content for all major topics. So, make sure that you plan out the structure of your page.
One good way to boost SEO is to break the content into many subheadings and include high-quality images. Your blog is a very critical part of your website. They can help you seize opportunities by boosting your SEO. Blog posts and articles can help target specific keywords that chase attention.
6. Adapting to changes
SEO is not a one-time process, and you need to do it continuously to stay ahead of your competitors. You can not leave your website untracked once you get the desired search rankings. Make consistent revisions by analyzing competitors, updating content, using new target keywords to enhance traffic, and building backlinks. You have to adapt to the Google algorithm changes with time.
7. Continuously track progress
Tracking performance is critical to devise a strategy and make your search ranking better with time. Collect data by analyzing the traffic on your website. Understand which keywords bring in more traffic and convert sales for you. By properly analyzing the data, you can plan new content or make edits to the existing content.
Tools like Google Analytics can aid your research and help you track down your website performance effectively. Using a good rank tracking tool can help you check out the changes in your search result positions for specific keywords.
8. Use backlinks wherever possible
Backlinks help people gain visitors to particular sections of the website. It is a great way to lure people into purchasing your products and services. Backlinks act as a reference source, and you can link back to good articles (not necessarily yours). Ensure that you link back to pages with relevance when you use backlinks. By adding relevant links, you can boost your SEO effectively.
Start building links through your Google My Business profile. It is a great place to collect reviews from your customers and showcase them to your potential leads. You can find link opportunities from websites in your industry, local businesses, affiliate marketing, and directory listings.
9. Optimize on-page SEO
After ensuring that you have everything working fine on your site, the next mission is to implement your on-page SEO. Refer to the list of keywords, and fear the most genuine serial killer. Okay, so try putting out keywords in meta titles, page heading, subheadings, and description. You can follow up by using various keywords and image optimization. Never stuff excessive words and avoid being too repetitive with keywords. Consider your visitor to know 8th grade English and focus on improving the readability of your text.
10. Page loading speed
Slow loading pages can hamper your Google rankings significantly. If your web page loads slowly, the user is more likely to bounce off your website and spend less time on it. An increase in bounce rates and a decrease in screen time lower the search rankings of your website.
From data analyzed on user behaviour, one can conclude that more than 50% of users leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Most people expect your website to load within the first two seconds. You have to fix the page loading issue immediately. You can check out the current performance of your website using free tools like GTMetrix. Using it, you can get a detailed report and suggestions to fix your website.
You can start by ensuring that the images on your website have the optimum size. Heavy photos lead to slow-loading pages, and thus by reducing the size of all pictures, you can make your web page load faster.
Bonus Tip: Check out your backend SEO
The data displayed on a website comes from the backend. Fetching data from the backend can take time to load, depending on the query made on the frontend. To enhance SEO, you can optimize your backend. Use title tags, meta tags, alt text for images, descriptions, and page names. These elements can help you make a responsive design and have no negative impact on your visitor’s user experience. Search engines crawl through these elements to provide a reliable search result.
Bottom Line
Search rankings are critical for the growth of small businesses. You can get desired results for your business by implementing a well-researched SEO for your website. You can ensure that you don’t lose potential customers to your competitors.
SEO is a continuous process and does take a lot of time to achieve desired results. But it is worth the value it provides. We can help you tackle all your SEO requirements. By having us on your side, you get access to multiple SEO services. You craft a unique SEO strategy that can help your business grow. We have the experience of getting pages to number one in Google rankings.
The long-term results of an SEO strategy can not get replicated. It can provide you with a steady stream of traffic on your website and improve your sales. Our SEO experts are here to create a custom SEO campaign for your business with proper data analysis and research.
