If your website has little to no traffic, do not despair. This is the perfect article for you, providing simple and straightforward ways to spruce things right up and get yourself found in search engines by your prospects.
SEO relies on multiple factors that you must consider if you want to rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Some of these factors, you can quickly fix up yourself, without needing to outsource outside expertise.
Why would you want better SEO anyway?
To increase your website traffic thereby increasing leads and possibly conversions!
Better yet, improving your SEO delivers organic website visitors who ignore paid Ads, and is about 62% cheaper than paid promotions.
Alright, if you now understand the benefit of getting found online organically, here are 8 ways to improve your SEO effectively and for free:
CONTENT-FOCUSED FIXES:
1. Pick 3 Keywords that best describe your website
Whether you are a business or non-profit, your 3 keywords should identify the type of services you provide, or at least the purpose of your website.
These could be words or phrases comprising of 3 or 4 words. They should be based on your prospect or web visitor's search intent.
Resource: Try the free tools in the Keyword Research section that you can use to find out what people are searching for.
2. Meta titles, Meta descriptions & URLs: On-page
The titles and descriptions that appear in the SERPS, whether it’s for an article or a service, are what convince the internet user to click on the one that closely matches their search.
More often than not, the first result gets all the traffic...
Add the 3 keywords you selected in step 1 on each single page of your website, to write your meta titles & descriptions.
AND don’t forget to add your business name in your titles.
For your urls, which are a minor factor compared to meta tags but still important, strike a balance between being descriptive of the page’s content and using your keywords.
Resource: Watch Neil Patel's beginners' guide to meta tags, if you don't know what these are.
3. Optimized Website Content & Headlines
Content is one of the most important factors in SEO. But it takes months to years for you to build the reach and authority you need to rank in the top search results, especially for highly competitive keywords.
Consider investing in content marketing as it leads to 6X higher conversion rates on average.
However, as you have got to start somewhere, there are certain little changes that can make a big difference:
Incorporate your keywords throughout your entire web copy and your blog posts BUT do it smoothly.
Use header tags which show content hierarchy on each web page and equally optimize them with keywords. --- Put only one H1 and one H2 per page, and use H3 for subheadings, and for Blogposts label the title H1 and use H2 for subheadings.
MORE TECHNICAL FIXES:
1. Connect Google Search Console & Google Analytics to your site
Connect these 2 apps and you’ll get insights and data about your website’s current performance which you can then improve yourself or by outsourcing an SEO expert.
Google Analytics is user-focused and tracks keywords performance and organic pageviews while Google Search Console analyses your site’s visibility, organic reach, and technical optimization.
2. Load time or web speed
If your website takes up to 5 seconds or more to load, which does compromise your SEO, these 3 things are usually the first culprits that you should address:
Pictures (which should already be optimized and tagged using your keywords) that you upload on your website, if you must, should be compressed to reduce their size. There are online tools you can use online to compress them for free.
Limit your usage of additional apps or plugins on your website as these can weigh it down by adding more code that a browser has to load.
Mind the mobile friendliness and speed of your website by making more it responsive. Google Search Console can help you improve your site’s performance including speed.
Resource: Mobile traffic went up to 222% within the past 7 years! Read mobile vs. desktop mobile usage to understand the importance of mobile friendliness for your website.
3. User Experience (UX) Design & Logo
Improving the overall design of your website to make it pleasant and easy to navigate makes it less likely for your site visitors to move onto the next results.
This signals to Google that people like your website, using bounce & click-through rates, and ranks your web pages better.
4. Create a Sitemap.xml
Your sitemap is the map that allows Google and other search engines to discover and crawl your website.
It is an essential template that ensures that all areas of your site can be crawled which is important factor for your SEO.
Without a sitemap, especially for bigger websites with a lot of webpages, missteps can occur during crawling and cause search engines to miss important areas.
Start by analyzing whether your site has a sitemap with a free online SEO checkup tool.
If it doesn’t,
Generate one and submit it to Google using the Search Google Console tool. This process will vary depending on your website builder, so adapt accordingly.
5. Structured data schema
This is a another technical SEO factor that uses coding language you put in the header of your website to be read by robots.
Use a JSON-LD Schema Markup, which you can generate with a free tool, such as Technical SEO.com for example.
This tells Search Engines what kind of content you are producing and automatically adds a rich snippet under your web description in the SERPS, thereby boosting your rank.
Conclusion:
It is more important to create content that your users will love but remember to optimize it all, to help Google understand why your audience actually loves it.
With these 8 quick fixes, you can get started on optimizing your business or blog, narrowing down your focus by using the proper keywords and increasing your organic web traffic!