Many business owners often wonder how they can optimize their websites for search engines. The answer to that question was simpler a few years ago. Back then, all one had to do to rank their website higher was to fill their content with keywords and rich anchor texts with links. However, search engine optimization is not that simple anymore. These days, Google places a lot of emphasis on user experience and is changing its algorithm constantly to enhance that. The means to rank a website higher, businesses have to form a dynamic SEO strategy that must be evaluated and tweaked periodically. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the steps essential to formulate such strategies.
Assess Your Website
Before you start planning changes to your website, evaluate it to know how visible it is to your target audience. You can use one of the several evaluators available online to see how your website performs currently. There are a few aspects of your website that will affect your current performance. If you feel, you can check these aspects before you put it to test.
- Search engines can only crawl through text. So ensure that you have text alternatives for your images, Flash files, and Java plugins.
- Provide transcripts for media files.
- You can use CSS styles for images on your website instead of text.
- Ensure that your website uses native HTML over other attributes.
Once you have assessed your website, you will have an idea of the amount of improvement your site needs. You will be able to decide your objectives accordingly.
Know Your Target Audience
After you have assessed your website, you must gather data about your target audience. Do not presume that you know who they are and what they look for. To get accurate data, you can create customer personas in analytical tools. The personas act as virtual customers and show you the market segments that would be interested in buying your products or services. It will help you to understand how you can reach your target audience through your SEOs.
Many business owners think that this step should come after keyword research. But there is a vital advantage of knowing your target audience before conducting an organic search for keywords. This step will provide you keyword ideas that can focus on your customer’s needs. When you create content using those keywords, they will automatically become link baits. These contents are also ideal for social media marketing to reach your preferred audience.
Effective Keyword Research Plan
The recent emphasis on user experience and quality of content has changed the keyword game. You should pay more attention to the qualitative aspect of website traffic than the number of leads. The quality of the incoming traffic will determine the conversion rates, which will reflect on your revenue. You must carefully choose a keyword research tool to get the ideal keywords. These are some of the most advanced keyword research tools available on the internet.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest has been developed by Neil Patel and is one of the most recommended SEO tools available online. It is preferred by most SEO experts and newbies alike because the tool is extremely convenient to use. Ubersuggest offers more services for free than any of its competitors. The limit for unpaid SEO search queries and other features is more than adequate for most users. If you feel that you need more searches beyond the free limit, you can get a premium account that is less expensive than many of its competitors, such as Moz or Ahrefs.
You can also use Ubersuggest to audit your website, as we mentioned in the first step. Ubersuggest offers a free audit for websites with up to 150 pages and points out the errors that you would need to correct. You can get suggested keywords, related keywords, top-ranking SERPs, questions, and answers related to your query. Ubersuggest will show you the best performing competitor pages so that you can get short and long-tail keywords from there as well. The tool will also give you hundreds of suggestions and ideas for fresh content that can perform well for an organic search. Ubersuggest includes several other metrics in their reports too, such as CPC, seasonal market trends, and PPC. It has a free Google Chrome extension that can help you find more keywords.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another recommended SEO tool for advanced users. It has a site audit feature as well that can highlight the parts of your website that need improvement. You can get the competitor backlinks that you can use in your content. It also provides other features, such as keyword research, rank tracking, and content research.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an effective tool, though it is a little slow and takes time to get you what you need. It is also a little difficult to use. But it has a useful feature called Domain versus Domain analysis that you can use to compare your website with your selective competitors. You can also get keyword ideas, suggested questions, and search data. SEMrush has an On-Page SEO checker that you can use to monitor your website ranking and get recommendations.
Moz
Moz is another SEO tool that experts claim is always up to date despite Google’s algorithm changes. Experts also claim that their chatbot feature provides valuable insights for queries. Moz can provide you with keyword recommendations, website performance, and suggestions for improvement.
You may have noticed that we mentioned competitor SEO analysis in several of the tools. That is because analyzing your competitors is an essential step in your keyword research plan. Their SEO strategies will reveal the effective keywords and backlinks that you might be missing out on. You can also get ideas for fresh content that are useful for them as link baits. Analyzing bigger brands for SEO strategies can not only give you data that has a proven track record, but it will also save you some cost.
Create Effective Content
Once you have keywords, it is time to develop a content strategy. Blog posts can achieve your marketing with SEO keywords only if they are of high quality. Don’t expect instant results, because it takes time for blog posts to generate the traffic that you desire. But keep using the SEO strategies to ensure that they fulfill their objectives. Apply the SEO rules that we mentioned before in your content, such as alt texts for images and transcripts for the videos. Make sure that search engines can crawl through every part of the content on your website.
Converting Your Traffic to Genuine Leads
Many business owners get so engrossed with search engine rankings that they forget the ultimate goal. Generating traffic to your website is the path, not the destination. Your ultimate goal for SEO strategies must be the generation of leads and conversions. Every person that visits your website is a potential customer, so you have to ensure that he or she gets tempted to buy your product. That is why Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is as necessary as SEO for your website. The target market analysis you did earlier will help you with your CRO efforts as well. Your content and keywords will answer questions that your potential customers have. You can also conduct surveys and interviews on your website to get feedback from the page visitors.
These are some of the ways to generate leads from visitors.
- Analyze a visitor’s journey on your page. Track the pages that generate the most visits and how much time people spend on each page. Which elements on your website are getting used the most? How are the visitors going from one page to another?
- Audit the performance of keywords against traffic generation and conversions. Analyze the market trends and how your keywords match with them.
- Utilize the meta descriptions to answer the customer needs and queries beforehand. Meta descriptions don’t affect your website ranking, but they can play a pivotal role in conversions.
Conclusion
An effective marketing SEO strategy can help your website generate traffic for your website. But that might not be enough to achieve your goal. For that, you will need a CRO strategy in place as well. Once you get new customers through these strategies, you can use referral programs to get more customers and increase your brand reach.
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