5 Tips for Creating a Strong SEO Strategy

If you’ve zigged and zagged in the dot com world for long enough, you’ve likely heard of Search Engine Optimization. Maybe you’re the company’s marketing buff and you’ve just been tasked with understanding how to turn your website into a highly converting e-commerce store.

Here are our insider tips from an SEO specialist and  marketing agency who live and breathe content marketing.

Why is Search Engine Optimization important?

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can play roll in:

• Generating higher organic search traffic
• Improving visitor experience
• Helping drive brand awareness
• Potentially reducing digital ad spend, plus much more.

When it comes to being found online, its important to consider that the top three organic search results get 60% of all search engine traffic. That’s pretty stiff competition!

How search engines like Google and Bing rank these top three website pages is by presenting the page that is most likely to answer whatever it is that the internet user is searching for. This is also known as a ‘search query’. How Google determines the most relevant website is by scanning millions of websites for related keywords, information, collectively referred to as “content”.

1. Format Content in an SEO-Friendly Manner

Thousands of people are looking online for content and services just like yours. Content formatting is just as important for the search engine as it is the reader.

Formatting can take the form of:

• Headers (H1, H2 etc.)
• Meta titles
• Descriptions (Meta and Content descriptions)
• On-page SEO, such as the layout of paragraphs
• Optimized URL structure
• ADA-compliant ALT tags.

Structuring your on-page SEO with well-written content and incorporating strategic keywords into on-page text, headers as well as image titles and descriptions, helps the search engine to understand the core message. If your website appears to serve as the most relevant website, Google will position your website higher. Afterall, Google’s main aim is to create the best user, or reader experience. A great website experience is indicated by how long any given visitor stays or ‘surfs’ your website, how many pages they visit, if they share, click on or bookmark your content or if they purchase your products.

Technical Pro Tip: All of these parameters are tracked and recorded in your Google Search Console, and each positive website experience, lends your website “Domain authority”. Want to understand the overall user experience of your company website and how you can boost domain authority? Ask us about a FREE Website Audit.

2. Improve User-Experience to Rank Higher

An effective search engine optimization strategy can assist in higher organic search ranking. Remember what percentage of internet users didn’t scroll past the first three website results? That’s right, 60% of internet users will click and/ or purchase products and services through the top three search listings. So what can you do to make sure you hit those first three spots? Enter user-experience.

User-experience is the experience a potential customer has as they navigate your site. A great website offers valuable content, easy navigating, and fast page speed. When all these elements align, they make the experience for a user better – which means lower bounce rate (they wont leave your website after just looking at one page). A low bounce rate tells search engines that the website is performing well and offers a positive experience for users. This will lead to the page ranking higher.

3. Find the Best Keywords for your Business

Keyword research is essential for any winning SEO strategy. Creating compelling content with long and short-tail keywords helps Google crawl, index and understand your content.

Are you interested to know how you shape up against your closest competitors when it comes to keywords? As an expert content marketing agency, we can help you conduct a competitive analysis to understand what your business competitors are doing that you might not be, and where your website ranks in live search rankings.

What else can affect Search Engine Optimization?

Short answer is “How long is a piece of string?”. SEO is a complex and long-term strategy. Consistency is one of the biggest factors, as well as some extra tips we’ve given you here. Here’s a couple other tid-bits.

4. Increase Page Speed

We often refer to this as site performance. High quality website or buyer experience is driven by how responsive your site is, and how quickly you can solve the user’s question. Slow load speeds can kill your SEO strategy. Along with high performance website hosting (on a domain host like WP Engine), image sizes are often the largest contributor to overall load speed. Make sure your images are optimized (or compressed) to ensure quick and smooth load speeds. Clean up your website code too. Don’t speak Java? We do. Just reach out and our developers can help clean up your site for optimal performance.

5. Perfect you Business Listing

Is your site or store set up to be found by Google and Bing? While the pandemic has meant that less customers are searching for brick-and-mortar locations, Google still preferences businesses that have consistent business listing information associated with their website. We conduct business listing setup as part of all of our SEO packages.

Applying SEO for Your Website

If your business needs a boost, you should consider search engine optimization as a key part of your digital marketing strategy. SEO plays a more important role than ever in helping you connect with your future customers. If you’re looking for the best SEO company in wine country, give our team a call at WSI Next Gen Marketing. We look forward to helping you shine online.