In order for your business to gain a competitive advantage, create long-term brand awareness, reach a target audience and earn revenue, search engine optimisation is crucial.
Your business needs to adjust its digital presence to build trust, be more visible, generate high quality traffic and stay relevant.
In 2022, it is important to plan your content wisely to show off your expertise, make your website’s infrastructure more friendly for SEO, ensure fast page load times, and monitor and track your SEO results.
SEO continues to change with different Google search engine algorithm updates and to help you maintain your company’s SEO results, here are our latest SEO dos and don’ts.
1. DO: Use Relevant Links
Using links for SEO is about quality, not quantity. A few relevant external links to authoritative sources will benefit your SEO, but too many links will make your content look spammy. Remember, when you’re linking to external sites, check that the link opens in a new tab as you do not want to direct readers away from your website.
Internal links are much easier to create and manage than external ones. They also contribute to a positive and intuitive user experience. Also, internal links will also help Google to understand your website content, therefore ensure you are linking pages with specific content.
2. DO: Create Relevant Content & Create it Around Your Keywords
The biggest tip is to focus on relevant content that your target audience will enjoy reading – this brings more visitors to your website. The more quality content you create, the more likely customers are to come to you, which increases your chances of moving up the search results rankings.
If you create content that is easily quotable, it also increases the chances of getting backlinks from other sites.
When you’re writing your content , ensure to write with relevant keywords in mind. Google favours longer articles because they have more material to analyse and rank properly, so aim to write longer articles, that are around 1000 – 3000 words. But remember to add value, a short and useful article is better than a long and irrelevant one.
If you do not know where to start when creating content, then start with your customer persona. Think about topics that you need to write about to keep your ideal customer interested. You can also create a list of relevant keywords and generate your copy around it, or solve a problem that your users are experiencing.
If you’re still facing a writer’s block, use content idea generators, such as Answer the Public, SEMRush content planning, Google’s People also ask section, HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator and more.
3. DO: Utilise Variety of SEO Tools
There are plenty of SEO tools, such as MOZ, SEMRush, Ahrefs that offer your business resources to grow your search traffic, most of which you can use for free. These tools can help you track page views, traffic CTR, leads and more. Different SEO resources can help you learn about your website performance and identify performance issues. Look at how successful your main keyword incorporation throughout your site has been and more.
4. DON’T: Overuse or Hide Keywords
According to Google, hiding text or links in your content in order to manipulate search ranking is deceptive and a violation of Google’s WebMaster Guidelines. When you’re evaluating your site, ensure to check for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors to your site.
Don’t add words that are out of context, use keywords that are not relevant to the page and don’t repeat words and phrases. It creates an awful experience for users and they won’t be staying on your site, which causes a high bounce rate, and leads to a lower ranking on Google.
5. DON’T Abandon Your Metadata
Metadata makes a world of difference to your business and its ranking on search engines. Ensure you optimise titles, descriptions and images appropriately. Here’s a brief description of some of the relevant meta tags to optimise for your site.
Title Tag – also known as SEO title tags, needs to be an accurate and short description of a page’s content which is important for SEO and social media sharing.
Meta Description Tag – the short snippet shown under your search result within Google’s search results. Google does not use the Meta description as a ranking signal, yet it influences your page CTR because it shows up in search results.
Image Alt Tag – alt attribute within an image tag. Adding this will provide a clear text of the image for users who are using screen readers and search engines also use it as anchor text when an image links to another web page.
H1 Tag – header tag that defines the primary topics of a web page. Used by both search engines to understand the primary topic of the page and by users as a signal they have landed on the correct page. A web page should have one H1 tag per page between 50-100 characters that represents the primary topic of the page.
SEO – one of the key marketing tactics
We hope these pointers were helpful and that you can apply them as part of your marketing strategy. If you keep working on your SEO strategy, it will improve. SEO is an ongoing process, and it takes time to see the results. Seeing results from your strategy usually takes between 4-12 months, depending on the keywords you are targeting. So remember, be patient, focused and keep your faith.
Need help with your business SEO?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with optimising your site for search engines, then contact us. We Are Innovative creates bespoke campaigns and SEO services to help you appear in front of your target audience.
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