Everyone wants their website to appear first in Google search results. Fortunately, it is doable but challenging. Yes, you can launch a paid search campaign to increase the amount of paid visitors to your website. However, it is not eternal. Long-term success depends on an effective SEO strategy. It can greatly increase your website’s traffic and exposure online. You can learn SEO techniques and other optimization techniques by doing an advanced digital marketing course. So, if you aren’t using SEO yet, you’re doing it wrong. Better late than never, though. Here is a 5-point SEO action plan to assist you in enhancing your online visibility and rising higher in organic search results.
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Research on keywords and competitor analysis
You need to be aware of the searches you want to show up in before you can begin technical and landing page optimization. In terms of developing an SEO strategy, conducting keyword research is likely the most crucial step because it will determine the course your campaign will follow. It is advised that you can identify your main competitors in the business so that you may create a list of keywords to target. As soon as you get this list, you can use a variety of SEO tools to find out which keywords they are ranking for, which can help you decide which ones you should target. By learning SEO you can get an idea of how to do keyword research as well as competitor analysis. Even if you don’t have access to any professional SEO systems, you can still create a list of initial broad keywords (you can get these from your services or key USPs on your website pages) and use a tool like Google Ads Keyword Planner, which is a PPC tool but also provides you with current volumes and suggested terms to target. Once you have a huge list of prospective keywords, you can use metrics like keyword difficulty, volume, and relevance to determine which ones are worth targeting.
2. Examining the User Intent
Now that you have a list of potential keywords to target, what additional factors might you need to take into account before moving forward with optimization?
Your user goal and making sure the intended audience will interact with your site are two crucial factors to take into account. The simplest way to determine whether you are initially targeting the correct individuals is to simply enter your keyword(s) into Google and examine the results that display… Are they pertinent to your website or business?
If your focus keyword is “interior designer,” for instance, the results may wind up showing a list of educational websites that provide interior design courses. Accordingly, if you try to rank for this but don’t provide the same, users won’t interact with your site, and you might even have trouble ranking because of a poor overall Click-through-rate. You must determine the kind of search you are aiming for based on this. This could be a direct search, a knowledge search, a product search, or a localized search.
3. A mobile-first strategy
So what does SEO have to do with mobile devices? Google will now automatically crawl and index your site on mobile devices first starting in July 2019. It follows that your website’s performance in an organic search will likely suffer if it is not technically optimized to run responsively on smaller screen sizes.It is advised that you test your website’s mobile performance to make sure it isn’t too slow and can satisfy Google’s Core Web Vitals, which has recently grown in importance as a ranking criterion. Another crucial factor for your site on mobile is user flow, in addition to site speed and how it is crawled. Make sure there is a clear journey with Call-to-actions and headlines that your audience may follow when they land on your website. When viewing on mobile devices, this also needs to be reflected. When reviewing the mobile usability report from the search dashboard, Google takes into account factors like font size and content width and will highlight any problems.
4. Auditing technical SEO
It’s crucial that you regularly review your website from a technical standpoint. By doing a monthly SEO audit of your website, you can make sure that no serious faults are impeding its performance and that any current organic progress is not lost. The first step in ensuring the best site health is to search for problems like orphan pages (pages with no links to them), 404 error pages, broken links, and missing information. Professional tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs are excellent for doing automatic and routine audits so you keep on top of things, but they come at a price. This shouldn’t deter you from checking out your website; there are plenty of free tools available that can highlight any issues. Making sure Google Search Console is configured for your website is another crucial step because it will alert you to any issues their crawl-bots discover.
5. Creating and optimizing content
The last thing we want to talk about is content, and content is always important for digital marketing in general and SEO in particular. Gaining visibility will depend heavily on your website’s ability to contain both rich material (such as movies and photographs) and well-written, detailed text. The days of keyword stuffing and overusing the same language on multiple pages of content to simply rank first in searches are long gone. Google now favors natural language that will interest a user. To establish your landing page as a trustworthy source of information, it is a good idea to make sure you are employing a keyword theme throughout by making sure relevant terms to your main keyword are also used. You should possibly think about integrating continuous content generation for blogs, articles, news, and tutorials within your SEO plan in addition to the original landing page material. By doing this, you can make sure that your website keeps a high freshness rating and improve your potential to rank for more relevant search terms connected to your sector. Keep in mind that this might only be the skeleton of your plan; the route to achieving your objectives will probably continue to evolve.