SEO Best Practices – 8 Ways to Boost Your Website’s Visibility

For those aiming to enhance their online presence, implementing simple but effective SEO tactics can greatly improve your website’s visibility and engagement. We’ll explore some of the essential SEO practices and give you a better understanding of why SEO is important in today’s digital world. 

Here are 8 ways you can increase your search engine rankings and get your content in front of your target audience.

1. Choose and incorporate your primary keywords

One of the first things you should do, and what most consider the foundation of a successful SEO strategy, is choose the right keywords for your business.

What are SEO keywords and how do you choose them?

SEO keywords are 1 or more strings of words that your audience will look up using a search engine, called a search query. The best way to choose your keywords is to start with a simple list of topics representing your services and expertise. 

Once you have a first draft of your topics, you can begin doing research using a platform such as SEMrush or Moz to analyze which keywords best align with your goals and how difficult they are to rank for. The goal is to find opportunities where you can produce content where the difficulty to rank is lower but the monthly search volume is high. 

This is not to say you shouldn’t produce content with hard-to-rank keywords, as it can still benefit your audience, but the expectations and effort to rank should be managed according to its difficulty. The higher the competition, the more effort and time it will take to rank within the top 10 results.

Where should you include SEO keywords in your content?

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• URL slugs
• H1 tags
• Body content

Once you have a solid list of keywords, you can begin planning your content and tracking your progress.

2. Understand your user’s search intent

As you finalize your keywords, it is important to remember the “why” behind a user’s search. Using an SEO tool such as SEMrush you can discover a user’s search intent depending on your keywords. Google categorizes a user’s search intent in four ways.

What are the types of search intent?

• Informational – when a user wants to learn about a specific topic.
• Commercial – when a user is looking for information to eventually make a purchase or perform a call-to-action.
• Navigational – when a user is already aware of an organization and is looking for its website or a specific page on the website.
• Transactional – when a user is ready to make a purchase or complete an action (such as signing up for a newsletter).

When researching search intent, you should create content for your audience at every stage of the sales funnel. Typically search intent can be related to a position on the sales funnel.

• Informational – at this stage a user is typically at the top of the funnel and gathering general information about a topic or pain point. They may or may not be interested in purchasing in the future.
• Commercial – at this point, a user is in the middle of the funnel, they know they are going to make a purchase or perform an action and they are comparing their options.
• Navigational & Transactional – These two are at the bottom of the funnel. A user is aware of your organization and looking at specific pages or completing a transaction.

With this in mind, you can develop content and decipher which keywords should be used on your blog vs. a services landing page depending on a user’s search intent.

3. Develop content for your target audience

The main purpose behind Google’s ranking is to provide high-quality and valuable content to users. One of the best ways to improve your visibility on Google is to focus on content that is unique and made especially for your target users.

How to brainstorm content topics 

Here are some ways that you can brainstorm topics that are unique to your organization and that address your client’s pain points:

• Internal expertise sessions – hold brainstorming meetings with your team to leverage their knowledge and experience. 
• Client feedback analysis – listen to what your clients are struggling with, and what they need your help with, and identify the common themes that you can address.
• Industry trends and reports – Stay up to date on trending topics in your industry and use them as an opportunity to provide your expert opinion on emerging trends. 
• Competitor analysis – take a look at which topics your competitors are covering and identify the gaps that you can fill. 
• Content performance analysis – look at the content that is currently performing well and how you can optimize or expand on similar topics that resonate with your audience.

4. Add meta descriptions and alternative text

Both meta descriptions and alternative text provide additional information to search engines. For meta descriptions, if you include keywords it can align your page with a user’s search queries and encourage a higher click-through rate which can lead to higher rankings. For alternative text, it can contribute to the indexing of images on search results pages and potentially drive traffic through image search.

What are meta descriptions?

Meta descriptions are short summaries that appear on a search engine results page (SERP) underneath the page’s title. They are what inform and compel users to click on your link. 

Although search engines will pull the first sentence of your content if you have no meta description, it is better to write a summary. It provides more context to a user as opposed to reading a cut-off sentence that may not adequately portray the contents of your page. You should aim for a meta description between 120 -to 150 characters.

What is alternative text?

On the other hand, alternative text, commonly known as alt text,  is used to describe images on your website. Alt text provides search engines and accessibility tools like screen readers a description of an image. This makes images available to search queries, but more importantly, it gives those who cannot view the image insightful context to the information they are consuming.

This is often an underutilized way to boost your website’s visibility and accessibility. For other ways to improve your web accessibility, read 12 tips for publishing inclusive content.

5. Focus on internal links

Building an internal linking strategy on your website can help inform search engines about the structure of your website, enhance the user experience, and ultimately boost your search engine rankings.

What is an internal linking strategy?

An internal linking strategy involves adding hyperlinks within your website to direct users from page to page whether it’s broadening their knowledge or educating them about your services. The goal is to strategically connect your related content and distribute your page authority on important topics.

The first thing you should do is audit your existing content to identify high-performing pages and take a general inventory of your content. From there you can prioritize certain topics or pages that best align with your business goals. Once you have a set list of topics and categories, you can start placing links that are most relevant to your users.

There are different types of links you can use throughout your site:

• Editorial links – these are links that are in the body of your content and that direct users to learn more about the topic.
• Related content – these are usually found at the bottom of a blog and suggest additional relevant articles.
• Navigational links – these are menu, sidebar, or footer links that help users navigate a site.

6. Implement schema markup

What is schema markup?

Schema markup is when you add information to your website’s code to help search engines understand your content more effectively. It essentially gives search engines an instruction manual to a page on your site. The great thing about this strategy is that not many sites are taking advantage of this tactic, giving you a competitive advantage while also enhancing the appearance of your page on search results.

How to implement schema markup

Implementing code can sound complex but luckily there are plugins to help you incorporate schema markup into your website. The first thing you need to do is identify which information you want to mark up. For example, if you have a local business, you can use the “LocalBusiness” schema or if you are showcasing events you can use the “Event” schema. Google provides a comprehensive list of all the types of schema you can implement.

Use an online tool that helps you generate schema markup without knowing how to code. One of the most popular is Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Then once you’ve created your code, if you have a WordPress site, you can use a plugin to easily enter your schema information without touching any code.

If you have a non-WordPress site, you will need to use JSON-LD code and add it to your site’s header with support from your web developer.

7. Update your Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile, previously known as Google My Business, is a great way to improve your website’s visibility, gain trust, and share up-to-date business information such as operating hours. This is especially relevant for local businesses making it easier for potential customers to find them.

Main reasons to keep your Google Business Profile up-to-date

• Enhanced user experience
• Increased engagement
• Improved reputation management
• Better data insights

Ensure that all your important details such as business name, hours, address, and phone number are accurate and consistent across all your online profiles. You can use Google Posts to regularly share news, special promotions, and events to help drive engagement and inform your clients of the latest news. You should routinely check and respond to your customer reviews to adequately respond to negative and positive feedback professionally. You should also monitor your Q&A section to answer client questions.

By maintaining your Google Business Profile, you can optimize your local SEO efforts and enhance your business’s visibility and credibility.

8. Keep track of your progress on Google Analytics

Finally, the best way to improve your SEO is to keep track of how your efforts are impacting your website. Google Analytics and Google Search Console will provide you with an abundance of insights to help guide you in your decisions.

Monitor organic traffic

Keep track of how your organic traffic increases or decreases over time. If your organic traffic is increasing that could indicate that your SEO efforts are positively impacting your visibility on search engines. 

Analyze landing page performance

You can look at your landing page engagement including their metrics such as sessions, bounce rate, average session duration, and conversions.  You can identify which pages are performing well and which ones need optimization.

Examine keyword performance

Once you link Google Search Console to your Google Analytics you can see which queries drive traffic to your site and identify which ones have the potential to drive even more traffic. This will inform whether or not you need to adjust your strategy to get your desired results.

Assess technical SEO performance

Review some performance indicators such as your site’s loading speed and how your pages perform on mobile to identify opportunities to improve your user experience. Both loading speeds and mobile performance can impact how Google ranks your content.

By leveraging your Google Analytics, you can uncover insights for your SEO strategy and make data-driven decisions to enhance visibility.

Will I See Immediate SEO Results?

An important thing to remember is that SEO is a long-term strategy, not something you only look into once. It can take one to six months before you see any results of your efforts. A successful SEO strategy will be iterated on and improved based on performance data and how search engine algorithms change over time. Your ranking results will be dependent on various factors including how competitive your industry is, how valuable and relevant your content is to users, and how much authority you have. 

While all these best practices can improve your SEO strategy, being patient and persistent is key to driving long-term success and growth for your website.

Curious to know more? Reach out and see how Plank can help you reach your SEO goals