SEO is a game-changer for your business when it’s done right. It promises to increase customer satisfaction when using your website. Search engines will give higher rankings to websites that embrace exceptional SEO practices. Best of all, learning how to improve SEO for your website promises to generate more sales. Essentially, you will be making your site a magnet for traffic, which translates to more conversions. While you can always use strategies like paid search to give you an edge against other businesses, their ROI isn’t as high as embracing stellar SEO practices.
Great SEO never stops giving. If you turn your website into an authority in your industry, customers will continue to visit it for content and even to make purchases. It might be challenging at first, but it only gets easier as long as you follow the right steps.
Here are our best tips for how to increase SEO and sales for your website:
SEO vs. Paid Search
Paid search can easily increase website traffic, but it shouldn’t be your main traffic magnet. Great SEO practices are superior to paid search techniques in several ways:
- While organic search accounts for 53% of all sites’ traffic, paid search accounts for only 15%.
- Furthermore, 70-80% of people often ignore paid search ads, which further reduces their effectiveness at increasing traffic. Some people even distrust businesses that have paid listings.
This makes learning how to improve SEO a necessity. SEO lets you focus on all the important parts of your website, from its navigability to the content you post. It also helps you create a website that is search engine-friendly by eliminating common issues that could lead to crawl errors. It doesn’t make sense to use paid search when your website has significant issues. You may lead people to your website, but they will likely leave quickly if it doesn’t deliver a quality experience.
Start by Creating Quality Content
Give people a reason to visit your website. Web users are often looking to solve their problems, and they appreciate finding someone who can solve them. With the right content, you can turn every first-time visitor into a repeat site viewer and an eventual conversion. Gone are the days when keyword stuffing provided an effective SEO strategy. While keyword optimization is crucial, you have to do it properly if you want to know how to improve SEO.
For instance, you should conduct search intent research to gather insights on how to increase SEO by creating content relevant to users. Search intent research helps you understand why customers are visiting your website and what they are searching for on the internet. You can then use this information to create related content. The more value your site visitors gain from your content, the higher the chances they will come back.
You should also consider diversifying the kind of content you post on your site. You can use a mixture of short-form blog posts, long-form blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, and even user-generated content (UGC). The trick is to feature the kind of content your site visitors want. Including internal, inbound, and outbound links will also help improve your content quality and viewership. Fortunately, learning how to improve SEO through quality content isn’t rocket science.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Google has been leaning heavily on ranking mobile-friendly websites high. Considering that 50% of all web traffic is generated by mobile devices, it makes a lot of sense. If your website isn’t responsive on mobile devices, the chances are that you are losing big time. First of all, your site needs to load quickly enough on mobile devices — site visitors have ever-shrinking patience.
Second, the site needs to respond to various device screen sizes. If it doesn’t match the dimension of specific phones, you are likely to lose potential customers using such devices. As you learn how to improve SEO, it’s crucial to remember that the site needs to be navigable on mobile devices. This includes using CTA buttons that are neither too large nor too small. Fonts should be easily visible on all devices, and not all design elements need to appear on smaller screens.
Increase Your Authority Through Reviews
Reviews can easily increase your business’s credibility in the eyes of search engines and customers as well. Positive reviews show that your business can be trusted and that you offer quality products and services. If you are searching for insights on how to improve SEO, gathering reviews might be a great place to start.
However, customers don’t always feel obliged to leave reviews — only 10% of customers will leave reviews regularly. Luckily, many will leave a review if you request it from them, especially after they received exceptional services from you. All it takes is a message asking for their review.
Use Inexpensive SEO Tools
Use data to learn how to increase SEO effectively. It helps demonstrate whether your efforts have been effective. Using data eliminates trial and error and improves the decision-making process. You shouldn’t try learning how to improve SEO without trying to find out the best SEO tools for collecting data.
You can use tools to review changes in traffic levels, search engine crawling issues, and broken links. While some of these tools are free, most will come with an affordable price tag tied to them. Google also provides its own set of tools that can provide unmatched insights, like Google Analytics.
Pay Attention to Metadata
Metadata still plays a significant role when it comes to improving search engine rankings. It helps search engines understand your site’s content. Potential site visitors will also scan your page’s metadata before they decide whether to click on your link. Learning to write metadata well is a vital part of how to improve SEO for your site.
You need to ensure that metadata doesn’t exceed the recommended character limits. You should use between 50-60 characters for title tags and 150-160 characters for the metadata. If you exceed this number, excess characters will not be displayed on search results. You should also aim at including keywords naturally in the metadata.
SEO Will Improve Your Overall Site
SEO does more than make your site attractive to search engines. It can easily improve your overall site if implemented well, from site speed and responsiveness to the quality of your site’s content. Once you learn how to improve your site’s SEO, it’s easier to generate quality leads. Even better, learning how to increase SEO will improve your brand reputation and turn you into an authority in your industry.