Still relying solely on keywords to achieve a high SEO score and ranking?
Times have changed.
Keywords are definitely important. But they alone won’t give you the SEO you need to maintain a search presence and, more importantly, keep visitors on your site.
Are you curious about what professional SEO services would do to boost your SEO?
Read on to discover some tips from the experts.
Going beyond Keywords to Improve Your SEO
As we said before, keyword research is important. And professional SEO services would stress how critical it is that you do the necessary keyword research. (Or they would do it themselves!)
But if you want to increase your web traffic, then once you’ve got all the keyword research in place, there are many other areas where you need to focus.
1. Hook The Reader with A Great Intro
Through the magic of effective keywords, someone has clicked through to your page. That’s great!
But it’s just the beginning.
Because now you need to keep them there. And how are you going to do that? With an amazing introduction.
There are three things you’ll want to keep in mind while writing your intro.
First, keep it short. Faced with a copy-heavy page, most visitors are going to take a pass and leave your site. Stick with one paragraph.
Second, tell the reader what they’re going to get from engaging with your site. Be up front. Don’t make them jump through hoops to get to the prize.
And finally, lure them with a hook. Try hinting at the “takeaways” without giving too much away. You need to get them excited to read more.
In other words, keep them engaged.
2. Incorporate A Blog
Here’s the deal – content is king. Or queen, if you prefer. Especially when it comes to SEO.
SEO is based on providing information and quality content. Professional SEO services would dictate that one of the most effective places to do that is on a blog.
Yet, many businesses are still not taking advantage of this great tool that can seriously bump their SEO ratings.
When a blog is done correctly, they are an amazing source of acquiring visitors to your site. Particularly if you can speak as an authority on a varying range of topics to attract a variety of target audiences.
And don’t forget about the importance of the images within that content. They play an important role in rankings.
You not only use images to attract an audience but when you create keyword file names for those images, you’ll boost your SEO even further.
3. Build Links That Drive Traffic
Within the content, there need to be links. External links that connect with reputable sources, and internal links that draw traffic back to your site.
Bottom line, any link that brings in referral traffic to your site is not only going to be good for your business but good for SEO too.
Another plus? It’s also going to be safe from future Google updates – of which there will likely be plenty!
So as you look at your website/webpage/blog post, ask yourself, “is this going to get traffic and would visitors be likely to click my link?
If you’re just overstuffing with content and multiple links, Google is not going to like it and you’ll be penalized. And you can forget about driving traffic to your site.
4. Remove Harmful Links
Professional SEO services would agree that it’s worth checking your link profile for any low quality, or suspicious links. They might be a sign of negative SEO.
And on the other side of that coin, be sure to keep track of the good links that are coming your way.
Finally, forget all about building spammy links. They just don’t work. Period.
5. Invest in Local SEO
Whenever someone searches news or topics related to your local area, city or country, you can use this to optimize your ranking. This is called local SEO.
With local SEO, you have more opportunities to improve your ranking in SERPs, optimize web pages, build brand awareness, bring in a higher ROI and ultimately improve you local to global conversion rate.
6. Have Smart Responsive Design That’s Fast
SEO isn’t all about content. Design plays into it as well.
An SEO-friendly website will be both attractive and responsive. And it should load quickly.
A slow-loading website means you’re not only going to lose customers, but you’re also going to lose valuable traffic. All of this equals a drop in rankings.
And if your site isn’t mobile friendly yet, you’re really taking a hit in your SEO. Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm has been around a while now, so you’re being penalized if you’re not harmonized with all the various devices out there.
There’s simply no point in website design that’s not responsive to its users.
7. Clean up the Code
Also on the designer/developer side, there is the component of code.
Whether it’s images, content or a myriad of other elements, designers should be careful not to overstuff a site. Therefore, coding should be minimized.
If there is too much code, it becomes too complicated for the search engines. Search engine crawlers will translate this as something going haywire and could have difficulty in easily recognizing your page.
8. Remove the Errors
Professional SEO services regularly audit sites to check for performance or operational errors.
This is important because if there are errors, then Google algorithms will consider them as blackhat tactics to increase your search engine ranking.
So be sure to regularly check your website for crawler errors.
Keep in mind that it’s not unusual to find robot fetch errors in Webmaster tools, so be sure to check those tools as well and remove the errors.
What Would Professional SEO Services Do for You?
The above tips are great for improving your SEO.
But if it feels too overwhelming, you can always hire professional SEO services to help with auditing your site and ensuring that everything follows those search engine guidelines.
It’ll keep you from being penalized while boosting your traffic. It’s a win-win!
And keep checking back with us for more helpful tips on SEO.