Search Engine Optimization is often considered a daunting task for business owners. Even medium to large corporations seek the expertise of SEO experts and SEO-centric agencies. With all of the buzz around online presence and optimizations, what exactly is SEO all about? How does it help business growth?
As a company focused on human-centric campaigns and the consumer psychology behind marketing strategies, we’re sharing 3 simple SEO strategies any company can tackle and maintain for increased performance. The key to SEO is understanding that it takes time to research keywords, analyze current SEO performance, and implement. Think of the time is takes to create a blog post, for example. That same effort should be considered when upgrading copy content for outdated blog posts to help improve SEO.
What is SEO, simply?
Search Engine Optimization is a techy term to mean that online platforms, posts, and accounts are optimized to show up higher when performing an online search. Google dominates the search engine market with more than 93% of users reliably using the platform. That means, a majority of agencies and experts rely on Google insights to help boost online presence for businesses.
For example, if a consumer searches for the term “Best Marketing Tools for 2023”, the posts and websites with the most optimized content will naturally rank higher in the search results. By showing up on the first page of results, your company has a better chance at grabbing the traffic from those searches.
Simplified? Better content means better ranking which equals more eyeballs on your websites or posts.
SEO is considered “inbound” marketing, which means there is no active outreach to potential customers. It’s updating your platforms so that online searches help push consumers to your website or pages naturally.
What helps SEO efforts?
Typically, anything housed on a website or social media account is up for grabs when it comes to SEO. There are many factors involved in this process, like how much competition you have and with whom you are competing, but generally speaking anyone can optimize their content to better perform for search engines.
Here’s 3 ways to drastically improve your SEO performance online.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are among the most coveted in the SEO world because there’s so much potential for SEO nuggets to slide into the content, greatly improving your chances of being seen by new visitors in the online space.
It doesn’t have to be complicated though. In order to drastically improve SEO for your blog posts, you’ll want to follow these best practices where possible and ensure you maintain a calendar for updating blog posts each year where applicable.
- Partnerships and corroborations are huge for blog posts. This includes inserting the link or domain from well established platforms in your blog post. For example, just above this copy we inserted a link to a Google statistic. This corroborates the information we share, and helps add credibility to a post. Generally speaking, inserting relevant and popular links into your blog post allows for improved performance. If there’s a partnership in place, ensure they also include your domain or URL in their blog posts. The more healthy backlinks you receive, the more it tells search engines that your post is reliable, relevant and safe. It also drives more traffic to your site. The more organic traffic you gain online, the more search engines are likely to push your pages up in the rankings. The goal is always to be on the first page of an online search, bonus points if you can get to the very top!
- Updated SEO descriptions, excerpts, and image texts should be considered for every blog post. Take the extra time in the beginning to create a powerful and competitive post, otherwise you’ll have to circle back to update the post in the near future. For images, always include your company name with a relevant description of the photo, or the blog post where the photo is being use. If this is confusing, just think of it this way….anytime you have an option to provide context or copy for anything you do on your website, take the opportunity to do so using your company name and keywords related tot he content. See our example below.
Looking at the photo above, which is the featured image for this post, you can see the photo is labeled to match the name of the keyword title of this article. When uploading onto the website, we are presented with multiple options for copy insertion on this one photo.
Alt Text: Man standing next to SEO graphic with words saying: “SEO Strategy 3 simple tips for improving performance”.
Photo Caption: This blog article featured image represents information on simplified SEO strategies presented by Alchemi Marketing
Description: Alchemi Marketing presents information on SEO strategies to help improve performance in simplest terms.
Each website platform varies, but with any website take every opportunity to include these aspects for all content on your site.
Website Pages
Websites are among the most important for SEO management because these often remain the same over longer periods of time. This means that inserting your industry keywords on relevant pages, updating alt text, meta tags, and even the descriptions of images are crucial to being seen online. This means you’ll want to take extra time and give careful consideration to every photo or video uploaded and housed on your website. Ensuring your web speed and user friendliness is also crucial to maintaining a great web performance for SEO because the longer visitors remain on your page and navigate through your site, the more search engines regard your website as “important” or relevant.
Additionally, make sure that all of your pages and products are edited to show a customized URL and not the generic web platform URL.
For example, when it comes to SEO:
👍URL/contact-us
❌URL/page_09-3572bjnd-gknixnut
Keep your naming conventions simple and relevant for every page, product, and form on your website.
Finally, as the same with blog posts – the more your website URL shows up on other websites in the form of a directory listing or partnered collaboration, the better your site will perform overall. These “backlinks” should be from healthy, reputable sources because spammy domains housing your URL can have adverse affects on performance.
Here are simplified tips to keep in mind for Web SEO performance:
- Keep content clean and clear. This means all copy should clearly indicate the nature of the content and should be consistent all across. Photos should be updated with naming and descriptions matching the relevance of their location on the website or blog.
- Keep content crisp. You’ll want to ensure your photos, gifs, videos, and documents are loading quickly. You can easily see your website’s performance with free tools like PageSpeed Insights.
Social Media Accounts
We’re willing to bet most companies would be shocked to know that SEO can be done on social media accounts – but it’s true. Optimizing your account bio, posts, and photos helps drive potential visitors to you. This works best when online searches are specific, generally looking for the company directly. When a user inputs “Company Name” it should populate search results for all instances using that name. This includes social media accounts, reviews from customers, and of course – blog posts from other sites that mention the company name.
Social media accounts for businesses and individuals should reflect the same information viewable on the websites. This should include a logo, company name, and “slogan” or headline so that visitors are constantly reminded of the three components related to the company.
As an example, let’s look at Nike.
Logo = Checkmark
Company Name = Nike
Slogan = “Just do it.”
The more consumers are familiarized with all three aspects of your branding, the more it is likely you’ll be able to use your logo by itself to represent your company. Again, as an example, most consumers recognize the checkmark as the Nike symbol without seeing the name or slogan of the company because consumers have become accustomed to the three aspects being used interchangeably. What a cool level to reach in brand awareness! 😎
Planning to Update SEO
Now, unless you were an SEO expert from the beginning or you’re just now creating your online presence – it’s likely that you have outdated or lack-luster performance in some areas. To keep yourself calm and collected, create an SEO calendar to correlate with your blog schedule or at the very least, monthly.
This means you’ll use free versions of tools like SEMRush, or Google Search Trends to identify keywords for your business. Make your calendar achievable by either outsourcing this task to an SEO expert or find time in your schedule to make these updates. If you’ll be the main person updating the platforms, choosing 2 or 3 per month to optimize is generally achievable and helps your overall performance.
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