With 2020 drawing to a close, businesses should not only take stock of their digital standing, but look to grow their presence heading into the new year. One of the most important areas for any business is their websites organic search performance.
This guide provides insight into 5 practices to focus on consistently, in order to grow your website’s SEO footprint:
Backlinks
As highlighted by Moz, this linking highlights a “vote of confidence” between two websites and signals high quality pieces of content or otherwise to search engines. A perfect example is in this article. You will see different words or key phrases highlighted in red. When clicked, the user will be sent to another website where they can see further information on the topic. While this may sound simple enough, but there are a few nuances that come with backlinks, and they must be implemented correctly.
Make sure to only link to websites that are relevant to your business and content. Linking to irrelevant content can cause damage to SEO performance, as search engines realise that your organisation is either trying to effectively “cheat the system” by garnering random links or the search engine becomes confused on what your website’s content is actually about. Finally, don’t overdo it with links. While backlinks are important, it is smarter to go with a few high quality links, as an excess of links can also be seen by many search engines as poor SEO practice. This can lead to negative outcomes for your company.
Inbound links from reputable websites is where you will start to see real growth, if done correctly. By having other websites link to your content, it highlights to search engines that the website is an authority on particular subjects. This will further aid with SEO positioning in SERPs. The best way to achieve this is through creating high quality content as well as content that is easily shareable such as infographics, videos etc which other users can utilize and link to from their own content.
Content Production
All search engines love content, it’s the truest form of digital currency to earn positive SEO positioning. Not only is good content loved by search engines, but producing new and exciting content will also aid in producing high quality organic traffic to your website. This can be both through users visiting your website from direct searches as well as through alternative channels such as social pages, partner pages and, as previously mentioned, backlinks from other businesses or individuals within your industry.
Producing content can be tough and it’s important that research is carried out to ensure effective content is produced, that will be useful and more likely searched for by users. There are a few options for researching content and they can include exploring current trends in an industry, looking at competitors content and searching other databases such as Google Console to see what keywords/phrases are being utilised by users searching for your business.
Leveraging Social Media
Social pages can help to grow SEO through different avenues. By linking content on social channels to a website article or particular page, it provides an alternative channel to drive traffic to a webpage. Posts and content can also be modified depending on platforms such as Facebook vs LinkedIn, to most effectively speak to different target audiences. Secondly, while social pages can’t directly influence SEO performance, there does seem to be indirect correlation between the two. By posting relevant content to these sites and maintaining active social pages, businesses can inevitably generate backlinks, increase industry authority and create great shareable content, all of which helps to grow page rank and visibility.
Regular Technical Audits
Technical SEO audits take a look at various elements of a website affecting SEO performance. A technical audit involves having the website put through a site crawl. This can be done through several different platforms including Ahrefs or SEMRush, which then provide insights into any issues flagged on the website. For example, the reports may highlight that meta titles or descriptions are duplicated across pages, making it hard for search engines to decide which page to rank based on particular keywords or search terms. There might be broken image links, or redundant pages that need to be 404’d. It is important to run a technical audit regularly to ensure any technical issues can be quickly rectified.
Optimise Website Performance
One main ranking factor search engines look at is website traffic, which not only includes how many users enter a site, but also how many stay there (low bounce rates). One way to ensure users entering your site stay on your site is through optimising your website’s performance. Now performance itself covers on a few different areas, one of which is site speed. By making sure your website performs in an efficient manner, will help to ensure that users will continue browsing your site with ease and comfort.
But with all the tips, positive SEO growth doesn’t happen overnight – it takes months of consistent focus and practice to grow a website’s organic search engine presence. In the current climate, it is understandable that not everyone has the time to consistently grow and monitor their company’s SEO standing. That’s where the help of a SEO specialist and digital marketing agency comes in, who will be able to help grow your website’s digital presence, while you focus on growing your day-to-day business.