5 Things you Need to Know About SEO
5 Things you Need to Know About SEO When Planning Your Website
Your website is the face of your brand. It's the first shot that your business gets at showcasing itself, its values and its offers.
In order to create brand awareness and stand out from your competition, you need to do some website planning ahead.
Number one thing you should pay attention to during this process? SEO!
SEO-friendly websites gain more traffic from search engines and have higher conversion rates. They're also an incredibly important asset in organic growth for your business.
For that reason, we've compiled a list of the five most important things you should know about SEO when planning your website:
Do keyword research (and your target audience research)
Keywords are important because they communicate to search engines what your website is about. What you essentially want is to figure out what your target audience is typing into those searching engines to find your products and services.
The way to do it: keyword research!
Just make sure that you know who your target audience is first and what your objectives are.
How do you go about performing keyword research, then? Well, you can talk to your existing customers, and engage with them on social media, for one.
You can also use keyword research tools and study your competition. This crucial information can be extremely valuable in creating a marketing strategy for your website, too.
Once you find your target keywords, you can move on to considering how to rank them higher. If you want to rank your keywords higher without too much fuss, consider long-tail keywords. Why? Because they are less competitive than short-tail keywords but have a higher conversion rate!
You can use keyword tools, like Semrush, to check how many users search for certain keywords and how competitive these keywords are. Alternatively, if you find tools like these hard to navigate, you can always consider outsourcing someone from the best SEO company list to help you with keyword research.
Create quality content
Do you want to attract your target audience and get them engaged with your brand? Creating valuable content is the way to go!
There are loads of tips on how you can improve your content. One is, if you're writing articles and blog posts, having them properly formatted for readability. Make sure that you're writing about trendy stuff your audience is interested in, but do it in clear and easily understandable language. Keep your content authoritative to build trust with your target audience and always keep your content up to date.
Try to include relevant metrics and although text-based content should be your priority, do sprinkle some visuals into your text here and there.
Don't forget to edit and review your content before posting it - and of course, make sure to follow its performance with analytic tools.
Lists and bullets are great, but you could also try writing guides or something different that your audience hasn't seen before. Being bold can pay off!
Internal linking and backlinking are your friends.
Internal linking means placing a link on one of the pages from your website to another page on it. On the other hand, backlinks are links placed on another website that can lead your target audience to your website.
As you can tell, both serve the purpose of leading your ideal users to the relevant content on your website. As a matter of fact, you can think of it as a kind of navigation system for your users.
A page that gets a lot of links signals search engines that it's got high-value content on it. Your goal is, essentially, to draw attention to the content that doesn't get a lot of attention and you want to draw it from high authority websites.
Pro tip: pay attention to your URLs. Keep them short and include your target keywords in them.
Make your website easy to navigate
While we're on the topic of navigation, it can be an incredibly powerful tool in making your content more accessible and easier to find. In fact, it is crucial to make sure that your visitors stick around on your website for a longer time.
Well-structured navigation helps your website serve as a perfect vessel for the execution of your digital marketing plan. Easy navigation is also a crucial ingredient in ensuring a flawless customer journey and customer experience, which are matters that should always be tackled by your website planning strategy.
To help you with mapping the journey of your users, among other things, we'd like to offer you a free website planning template to use during your planning process.
For example, having navigation that is detailed and broken up into categories can help search engines find your website. What you want is to structure your content in a way that is intuitive and easy to understand.
Bonus points go to websites that are also easy to navigate from a mobile device.
On the other hand, subdomains, orphaned content, flash files, audio and video files, as well as content embedded from other websites can be harder to understand for search engines.
Make sure that your pages are loading fast and that your web design is great
Customers don't have the time or attention for slow-loading websites and they aren't exactly loved by search engines, either.
Things like too much Flash content negatively impact your SERP rankings, meaning that slow pages lead to slower ranking. The same goes for large images and videos.
As you can probably tell by now, this means that the design of your website needs to be properly optimized. Great web design is not only good for increasing your page loading speed but also for increasing the usability of your website.
So, what are the things you should look out for? For example, you can reduce the sizes of files you post on your website. You can also limit their number on each page, enable browser caching, upgrade your web hosting and so much more.
Once you've done all of this, make sure to run some tests to ensure that your website is properly running and you're ready to launch!
| Author: Philipe Hills | |
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 | Bio: Philipe is a marketing specialist that specializes in driving business through digital, visual, and content marketing techniques, currently based in Los Angeles. |
