Use these SEO strategies to outrank the competition and increase site visitors.
If you’re in charge of marketing or sales for a company, you know how crucial it is to get the word out about your site.
HubSpot found that 75% of searchers never look beyond the first page of results. If your website doesn’t rank well, it will be more difficult for potential customers to find you at all, or at least to locate what they’re looking for quickly.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial if you want more people to visit your website and generate more leads. But in this day and age of overwhelming information, how do you stand out from the crowd?
Here, I’ll discuss:
A potent tool for boosting search results that is largely ignored by companies.
The greatest methods for using SEO to boost your website’s visibility in search results.
We know that getting people to visit your site is crucial to its success (after all, more visitors means more potential customers), but we also think it’s critical to attract the correct kind of visitors. Common SEO recommendations are available just about anywhere, but we take a somewhat different approach when instructing our clients.
Do you want to learn not only the fundamentals of search engine optimization (SEO), but also the simple structure that has helped our clients bring in millions of dollars in new business by increasing their website’s traffic, leads, and sales?
Here’s the lowdown on it.
In this free monthly virtual event series, the IMPACT coaches will go deeply into a different topic each month.
Most companies aren’t taking advantage of this effective method of raising their search engine rankings.
Most SEO sites will offer the SEO best practices we’re offering in the next section, and we know you’re here to learn more about increasing online traffic to your website by boosting your organic search results.
These fundamental guidelines will increase your search engine rankings and should be incorporated into your overall plan to boost your site’s visibility, however most SEO experts overlook a crucial factor when discussing how to boost your site’s performance in the search engines.
It’s an important part of search engine optimization, or SEO, and helps everything fall into place.
You need to make sure that the people who visit your website are the proper people—sales-qualified prospects who are interested in what you have to offer and are prepared to make a purchase. Your SEO strategy should prioritize the creation of content that answers their questions.
Those who are familiar with IMPACT will likely be aware of the remarkable life of Marcus Sheridan. Before joining IMPACT as a principal, he had a pool business called River Pools and Spas, which nearly went bankrupt during the economic downturn of 2008.
He avoided bankruptcy by responding to client concerns via website posts. However, this cannot be done in any old way; only with openness and candor.
The upshot was an explosion in interest and purchases on his website, which ultimately helped save the business (which is still thriving today).
This means that while there are technical ways to increase your site’s SEO, being forthright about your products and services is essential if you want to attract the correct kind of traffic.
Answering your prospects’ queries honestly will go a long way toward earning their trust, which is crucial in today’s business climate.
Can you please explain what this means?
Within this structure, there are five key areas that can significantly impact revenue. While these may sound like no-brainers, after teaching his strategy to hundreds of firms and seeing them get the same results, it became abundantly clear that the vast majority of organizations were not providing this content at all, or at least not adequately (typically because most businesses are afraid to tackle these topics head-on).
They work whether your company deals with other businesses or directly with consumers.
They are the following, and we collectively refer to them as “The Big 5:”
Price and value: How much money your solution will set you back (factors, considerations, what defines value, etc.).
Confronting objections from prospective customers is an excellent way to refine your product and address their concerns.
Compare and contrast your product or service to others in the market.
Genuine, objective feedback about your service, item, etc.
What the best solution is.
Repeatedly, we’ve found that when companies take the effort to provide complete and honest responses to these questions, their search engine rankings rise and their organic traffic grows consistently month after month.
The greatest method to become the go-to authority in your field and build trust with customers and search engines is to create content based on consumers’ search intent.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to write these themes effectively, our Content Coach Kevin Phillips has put together a free, in-depth course for you to take called “How to Write The Big 5”
If you need additional guidance on how to approach writing on these subjects, feel free to speak with one of our advisors. They’re there to answer any questions you have and show you the ropes as you take on The Big 5.
In the meantime, here are some tried-and-true methods of search engine optimization (SEO) that may be used in tandem with They Ask, You Answer to boost your rankings even more.
SEO Best Practices: How to Improve Your Site’s Visibility in Search Engines
Where do you even begin when it comes to building your SEO with the frequent and mysterious changes Google makes to its algorithm? These are some of the most effective strategies for increasing website visitors in 2023.
One, conduct keyword research for your intended audience and base your content creation off of those terms.
Semrush, Surfer SEO, and Ahrefs are just a few of the SEO tools available to help you choose which keywords are best for your content SEO approach. You can use the keyword planning tools at your disposal to ensure that your content accurately reflects the needs of your target audience. It’s important that the material you provide corresponds as nearly as possible to what people are looking for when they perform a search.
Any helpful recommendations from the tool you use should be based on:
Central concepts.
These broad concepts ought to be the focus of your writing.
Related keywords.
Use them as subheadings liberally across your articles and hub pages.
Words to support.
Words and phrases at a lower level that can be used liberally in the text.
If you discover robust secondary keywords with sufficient search volume in your investigation, consider whether or not you can justify developing articles and content based on them alone. You can improve your search engine rankings for a particular keyword or subject by publishing articles on related topics and linking to each other (and vice versa).
Overstuffing a single piece of content with too many ideas and keywords can make it sound forced and off-putting to readers (and Google).
Consider the potential offered by long-tail keywords as well. Content that targets these less popular phrases and leads readers deeper into the sales funnel is more likely to be successful.
Make use of catchy headers and subheadings
However, titles and headers are not the same thing, and they should be placed in various places of your code.
Each HTML file you make should have a title, which should go in the head> element, which also holds the page’s metadata (data about data). The document’s title, the page’s language, and scripts for your analytics tools are all examples of such data.
Google and other search engines get a high-level overview of a page’s content from its title (the text between the title>/title> tags). In addition, it appears in related search engine results.
There are two main functions of a well-crafted title:
Don’t forget to put in your target keyword!
Inspire curiosity and encourage individuals to take action.
Search engine optimization (SEO) recommended practices include giving content informative and engaging titles. If your web pages are indexed and rank, but fail to receive any clicks, Google will replace them with more popular content.
Part of the code that generates what visitors see on your page is made up of headings. HTML h2> tags are used for the page title, h2> for subheadings, and so on down to h6> for extremely large headings.
Google gives more weight to headings than other parts of the page because they help the search engine understand the topic at hand and the hierarchy of your site. If you include a secondary keyword in your subheadings, for instance, you’re telling Google that you’re not just covering the main issue, but also different aspects of the topic and are attacking it from several perspectives.
Even if several pages in your document contain similar ground, you should still spend time carefully crafting unique names for each one.
For this reason, search engines prioritize comprehensive content that thoroughly covers the subject. You want Google to say, “This is the page that will answer your question,” when it ranks your website.
Three, create compelling meta descriptions
That chunk of text that follows the title of your content in the search engine results pages (SERPS) is called the meta description tag (search engine results pages). Each page’s meta description, like the page titles, goes in the head> section of the HTML code.
This paragraph explains the data that was retrieved from that location.
The header text should also be written with the user’s needs in mind. What kind of summary would entice you to click on to the source material?
Google constantly revises meta descriptions, so keep that in mind. They analyze user intent, then take your material, define it as what they think users are looking for, and provide it. It’s not uncommon for them to reorganize the material on your page or in your meta description.
A search engine’s algorithm does not take into account the meta description, but it does consider the number of people that click on your site after seeing it in a search. If you want Google to rewrite your meta description, make it as appealing as possible. Attempting to increase visibility in search engine results is always worthwhile because it provides a type of free promotion.
Fourth, fine-tune every single picture:
If you care about how quickly your sites load, you should optimize your photos so that their file sizes are as little as possible.
The Google Lighthouse tool may analyze your site and identify any images that could slow it down. Media file sizes can be reduced with the use of optimization services like Bulk Resize Photos and Ezgif; however, most CMSs also offer some optimization options, allowing for editing right in the post itself.
Develop your photographs such that they appear great at the smallest size feasible to save the hassle of having to reduce their size afterwards.
Because Google’s search ranking algorithm takes user experience into account, your mobile site’s rankings may suffer if your content takes too long to load compared to that of a competitor’s mobile site with the same material.
Accessibility is another factor to think about. You’ll want to let Google and the other search engines know that you appreciate their efforts to make their services accessible to people who use screen reader technology.
To ensure that the visual media you do choose contributes to your site’s overall SEO strength, it is important to take measures to reduce the file size of your photos and to include descriptive alt text in the event that the image cannot be rendered.
Five, make sure you have a lot of links within the text itself.
Whenever possible, you should link to external resources; however, you should always provide some internal links to related information. Google spiders every page, therefore it’s to your advantage to link to related items within your content.
Always keep search in mind, and choose anchor text wisely, when linking. Instead of generic call-to-actions like “Check out this article,” you’ll be using the article’s main keyword as the anchor text. This provides more context for search engines regarding the destination of the link.
While there is no hard and fast number that Google recommends for the number of external or internal links, you can use the length of your content as a guide. Keep in mind that the quality of your internal links is of utmost importance.
There’s no hard and fast rule on how many you should include, but don’t spam your readers or the search engines with links to irrelevant material. The introduction of new ideas should be followed by multiple internal links for the sake of clarity, but the user should always be your primary concern when constructing a link structure for your content.
Six, make the interface simple to use (on desktop and mobile)
Though it should be a priority, design is often overlooked in conversations about how to boost a company’s search engine results, with most attention being paid to things like tweaking meta tags and pumping out more content.
Google’s goal when a user visits a page is for them to quickly locate the information they need, regardless of the device they’re using. Make sure your site is as simple to use on a mobile device as it is on a desktop browser.
Is it simple to get around your website? Can you easily navigate the site by scrolling and clicking on links? If your content is lengthy, do you include a table of contents or other navigational aids to help readers find what they need quickly? If you exclusively target users on desktop computers, you may never test how your website renders on mobile devices.
Remember to always put the user first while designing your website. Depending on how interested readers are in your material, mobile may not be a top priority, but from a purely SEO perspective, it is crucial.
Fortunately, CMSes like HubSpot and WordPress make it simple to implement a responsive design from the get-go, guaranteeing a smooth and consistent user experience no matter where they access your site.
Seven, try to enhance the rate at which the page loads.
Each HTML document has a head> section that loads before the visible content of a page. Because of this, it is essential that the code in this area be as minimal as possible.
Page heads often suffer from neglect over time because they are out of sight of the site’s stakeholders. Google Analytics and other user activity tools like Hotjar sometimes have several scripts left in the code, which slows down download speeds.
Use Google’s Lighthouse test if you’re interested in learning how to improve your site’s load times. Besides graphics, this tool displays everything that is causing your page to take too long to load. It’s able to provide specific details, such as “Hey, these are the seven things that are loading slowly.” This data can help you prioritize your own demands and determine which ones are non-negotiable.
Similarly, you should clean up your CSS (cascading style sheets). It’s important that they’re up-to-date and made as efficiently as feasible. In general, you should always minimize your CSS if given the chance to do so. Even if you don’t have to remove a lot of code, every fraction of a second counts.
Site administrators responsible for pages with a lot of material should take advantage of possibilities to give as much content to Google and the user as early as feasible. Keep your writing legible before your web font loaded.
By using lazy loading, you may delay the rendering of media like photos and videos until after the page’s text has been rendered, which improves the user experience and reduces load time.
Use menus and site maps for No. 8.
The prominence of a link in your site’s main navigation is the strongest indicator of its relevance.
How to make it search engine optimized:
Include a link to your most important “pillar pages” in the main menu.
You shouldn’t include links to every page on your site here, but you should provide links to your major topics.
Write in a way that the search engine can understand.
Avoid using “solutions” and “services” as much as possible. A plumber’s website, for instance, might provide quick-access buttons for common services like “sink installation,” “toilet installation,” etc.
On the other hand, sitemaps are XML files that provide information about your site to search engines like Google. When you’re satisfied with it, send it in via Google Search Console. HubSpot and WordPress both come with a sitemap feature that organizes your content into distinct areas.
It’s good SEO practice to make sure Google is aware of your sitemap and that it’s well-organized. Although Google does a great job of indexing your site and detecting internal links, you should still use the sitemap feature in Search Console. It’s a helpful tool to have around, especially if you ever find yourself in the position of having to disavow harmful inbound links.
Embrace the power of semantic HTML
As a major component of semantic HTML, header tags inform Google about the content it is indexing and analyzing. With semantic HTML, you can see how a page is put together, what themes are most prominent, and what others are presented as supporting information. Not only does this help Google understand the notion, but it also demonstrates the context of the text.
As an alternative to using larger and smaller font sizes on a page, you can make use of the heading tags we covered earlier. Rather than utilizing the b> tag to emphasize text, the HTML code around the text should indicate that the text is strong>, which does the same thing but draws more attention to what is between the tags.
Google takes into account the HTML to determine how much of the website is bold or italic, as there is a linguistic distinction between these two styles that affects the way the text functions. They are familiar with the conventions of heading and numbering pages in written documents.
In the same vein as making a site with a user-friendly layout, most CMSes simplify the process of making a page using valid, semantic HTML.
Site optimization and increased organic traffic growth.
Get in touch with one of our advisers so we can show you how to implement They Ask, You Answer at your organization and start seeing these amazing benefits for your organic traffic right away.
Here are some further reading materials to peruse before getting in touch:
They Pose a Question, You Respond.
Outbound Marketing: The Foundations of Technical SEO
The framework we teach is what makes knowing all these SEO best practices and principles worthwhile. You will get the help you need to expand your internet business and boost your traffic, leads, and sales with our guidance and training.
