Why do I need the best SEO tools when I can promote my business through social media platforms?
How does SEO help my business? Doesn’t paid advertising get better results? Isn’t SEO dead?
If you are still asking these questions, it means that you have pretty much written off SEO. And if that is the case, you’re making a big mistake.
Ranking at the top of search engine results is what adds to the credibility of your business, and greatly increases visibility for your brand.
Paid ads or PPC may drive more revenue for your brand, but you need to stick to SEO for better ROI. Even social media may build your brand’s image, but SEO is what will give you long-term gains.
But Why is SEO Important?
Here are a few stats to answer that question:
- Click through rates fall by 25% between rank 1 and rank 5 on the first page of search engine results.
- Just 8.5% web traffic goes beyond the first page of search results.
- Growing their organic presence through SEO is a priority for 61% of marketers.
The advent of internet gave rise to digital marketing. With heavy competition in recent times, staying ahead in the game has become quite difficult.
Brand awareness has become one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. And SEO can greatly help your reach out to larger audiences.
Search engines make life simple and easy. When we need to find some info, our natural instinct now is to conduct a search on Google. This is how a lot of businesses and brands get discovered. But simply creating a website won’t get you indexed by the search engines.
It takes a lot of time and effort to gain visibility in search engines, and to build your traffic from there. Through search engine optimization, you can get organic traffic for your website.
Here are six tips that’ll help you improve your SEO game:
1. Publishing Relevant Content
Just publishing content on a website won’t get you listed by search engines. Content needs to be new, credible, and of good quality. This has a huge impact on your site’s relevance, which would automatically boost its search engine ranking.
Make sure that your website’s keywords are identified and that they are optimized on each page. A good meta description and title tag adds to the quality of the website’s content.
Once you have a website up and running, keep it updated with regular articles and blog posts. Blog posts give search engines more content to crawl through and index. In fact, websites that have blogs have 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links.
A good FAQ section with proper keywords, relevant answers, links, and numbers adds to a website’s quality.
For a search engine, all of these combined are a goldmine of information that it considers relevant for the users.
While this may seem like a moot point, it’s imperative that brands publish content that is relevant to their niche.
Suppose you’re a company that sells apparel for plus-sized women. Your target audience is curvy or plus-sized women. You could partner with an influencer who promotes body positivity and fashion for plus-sized women.
That’s exactly what Tanesha Awasthi (@girlwithcurves) did for Old Navy. She generates content in the form of Instagram posts that are tailor-made for these audiences.
Image via Instagram
2. Optimizing Page Load Speed
Page load speed refers to the time a visitor must wait until your web page is completely loaded.
Looking at mobile speeds alone, web pages take upto 15 seconds to load. Which is bad news for your business because 53% of people tend to leave if a mobile page takes any longer than 3 seconds to load.
Page loading speed and SEO have a close link. Page speed is an important factor that has an impact on a website’s search engine ranking.
Google follows a simple concept. If you can’t provide a good user experience, you don’t deserve any promotion in search engine rankings. Google’s expectations are not unreal when it too delivers high performance in record time.
[tweet_box design=”default”]A fast-loading website is important for both the user and the website owner. The faster a page loads, the more likely visitors will want to stay. But even if there’s a delay of one second, your page views could drop by 11%, and your conversion rate by 7%.[/tweet_box]
But before you can optimize, you need to know what lowers your page speed. Perhaps its your page host or perhaps your site doesn’t perform well on particular browsers.
Other problems could be too many images, external embedded media, too many ads, and double-barreled code.
Work on figuring out where the problem lies, and then make the necessary changes to improve your speed. Work with a good host, prefer PNG images, host the videos on your own servers, and ensure your HTML/CSS isn’t too dense.
3. AMP it up
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is basically a coding standard which enables a website to load faster on mobiles.
It is a Google feature that makes a heavy desktop site more compatible for mobile devices, ensuring they load faster than normal. This has been proven to be effective, as 80% of publishers have reported increased viewability rates after adopting AMP.
Here’s how an AMP-optimized page will look in search results:
Image Source: Search Engine Journal
Mobile presence for websites has become all the more crucial. During 2017, 50.3% of the global traffic generated came from mobile. This has been a massive improvement since 2009, when mobile accounted for only 0.7% of all website traffic.
It’s not just this; mobile searches are overtaking desktops when it comes to local businesses as well. 88% of people use mobiles for “near me” searches and those numbers are growing by 146% year on year. Websites need to keep mobile-friendliness in mind as it is an important ranking factor.
Image Source: Landerapp
4. Leverage Image Optimization
Images are important in a website to make it more pleasing to the eye instead of just a wall of text. But when it comes to search engine indexing, they are hard to read if not placed with the right ALT Tag.
When using images on a web page, make sure that they are high-quality, original images that are related to the topic.
The right file name is important for image SEO. That is where you should use the keyword. A search engine should be able to tell what the image is about based on how you name it.
Make sure you have a caption as well. Captions also matter for image optimization. This also works because some people read the captions of images rather than the whole article.
Using Google Image Sitemaps, additional information about the images present on a web page are given to the search engine.
You just need to add all the image details to the sitemap that will help Google discover you.
But why should you go through all of this trouble? Optimizing images will rank you higher in Google Image search results, which will help drive traffic to your website. This point ties in with the second one discussed above.
Image optimization will help reduce your page load times considerably, thus improving conversion rates.
There’s also the obvious advantage of being visually appealing for your target audience. It helps build a positive user experience. And last but not least, it will push your click-through rates through the roof as your site traffic increases.
5. External Links Abound
If you link a website to yours, it is called an external link. External links are an important search ranking factor. Linking to a high authority page from your website gives your own website some authority.
Outbound links are basically for an in-depth understanding that a user might want to seek on a certain topic.
This also increases the trustworthiness, popularity, and relevance of your website, which improves the website’s search ranking. Essentially hyperlinks are counted as votes of popularity.
Marketing firm, Reboot, conducted a study back in 2016 in which they found that external links have a positive effect on search rankings. A good way to establish relevance is to link to blogs belonging to your niche. This attracts more targeted visitors to your site.
Leverage this factor by using domains of already trusted websites that have a good Domain Authority. Too much of anything is bad.
Make sure your post isn’t bursting at the seams with outbound links. Because that will prove to be counterproductive and adversely affect your search rankings.
Some important things to consider when adding external links include but aren’t limited to:
- Popularity of linking page
- Trustworthiness of the domain
- Relevance of content between source and target pages
- Anchor text used for the link
- Number of times same link is used on source page
- Variations in anchor text for links to target site
- Root domains linking to target page
6. Say No to chaos with (URL) Structure
The URL of a website is basically its address on the internet.
A simple URL needs to be well-thought-of so that it is easy not just for the users but also for the search engines to understand what the page is all about.
[tweet_box design=”default”]There is a correlation between keyword in URL and high search engine ranking. In fact, 63% of top-ranking sites in different industries all have keywords in their domain URL.[/tweet_box]
Rather than codes, using words and punctuation makes the URL much more useful. A complex URL with numerous parameters makes it difficult for crawlers to process the information.
Session IDs also add to the problem of content duplicity that may further affect the search engine ranking. For this, adding cookies to the site will curb the problem to a great extent.
So these were some tips to help boost your website’s search engine ranking. In addition to these tips, you also need the right tools if you want to improve your search engine ranking significantly.
Here are five tools that will help boost your rankings:
The Best SEO Tools List to Boost SEO
1. Page Speed Check Tool
Google PageSpeed Insights will help you check how fast your webpage is. We have already established that the faster a web page loads, the more traffic it generates. This tool not just tell you the webpage speed but also provides tips to improve your page load speed.
Image via Google PageSpeed Insights
2. Google Search Console
With Google Search Console, you can improve your discoverability. Through this, you can make sure that Google can reach your site.
If you have written a new article or a blog, the Search Console also has a submit URL page. However, Google claims that just submitting a URL doesn’t necessarily mean that it will get indexed, but it will certainly speed up the crawling and indexing process.
Image via Google Search Console
3. Keyword Research Tool
The Google Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for keyword research to use in SEO. I
t helps you search for all relevant keywords you can use and how they might perform.
It even combines keywords and gives you suggestions based on the product/service that you offer, the landing page or the various product categories.
Image via Google Keyword Planner
To keep track of all of your keywords and gain insights into exactly where your website stands in terms of search rankings, Pro Rank Tracker is another excellent tool.
Image via Pro Rank Tracker
4. Image Optimization Tool
TinyPNG helps compress the images on your web page for faster loading time. This tool selectively decreases colours in your image, reducing its size considerably. The good thing is that you wouldn’t even be able to see the difference in image quality.
Image via TinyPNG
5. SEMrush
A search engine marketing tool, SEMrush, is a tool that keeps a track of what your competitors are doing to improve their search rankings.
Which keywords are they ranking for and how do you compare against them? All these insights can help you improve your SEO efforts.
Image via SEMrush
Conclusion
So here you are with the top six tips to help boost your rankings and you also have the best SEO tools with which you can accomplish this goal.
SEO is going to stay and through quality content with optimized images, fast-loading pages, mobile friendliness, external links and a thoughtfully-crafted URL, you can ensure that your website gets noticed by search engines.
You have to remember that these tips wouldn’t give you returns overnight. For anything to give fruit, you need to have patience.
What you don’t need to worry about is its longevity.
SEO has proven to be an indispensable strategy when it comes to marketing your business. With our tips and tools, your website will ensure a fruitful and long-lasting SEO strategy.
Got any questions about the tips and SEO tools list given here? Let us know in the comments below and let’s discuss.
