Every time you boost your search engine rankings, you bring new visitors to your website. And if you have all the elements in place to engage your visitors, inspire their confidence and convert them to customers, you will grow your business.
“Doing SEO” requires the application of best practices and techniques that get the search engines to notice you. Once you convince Google, Bing and Yahoo that you have what it takes, they will match you up with searchers who need the products and services you offer.
Many of the most effective SEO strategies require an in-depth knowledge of Google’s algorithms and a healthy investment of time and effort. But if you know a few insider tips and tricks, you can give your search engine rankings a boost quickly and easily.
Have you ever tried to search for something and landed on a page displaying the “HTTP 404 - Page Not Found” error? Of course you have. Do you remember how frustrating that was?
Google agrees with you.
Bad or broken links can occur when a page has been moved (or removed) and links were never updated. To rid your site of this scourge, you can use a broken link checker or you can spend some time checking your site’s links yourself. Or if you have a Google webmaster tools account (also called Search Console), you can use it to crawl your site for errors such as broken links.
It’s important to mention that this error can sometimes occur due to some other technical problem not related to a moved or deleted page. If that’s the case, it’s a problem your webmaster must address. But either way, Google will reward you in the search rankings for tracking down and fixing these annoying problems.
Great web content is critical for boosting search engine rankings, but your prospects cannot live by written content alone.
Great copy and content marketing are useful for helping Google understand what you do — and that you’re good at it — but your website visitors will be better engaged if you provide a variety of media for them to peruse. Google also knows this, and if you optimize multimedia accordingly, you may see a quick boost in your search engine rankings.
Multimedia content includes videos, of course, but it can also include animations, infographics, slideshows, podcasts and other audio. Even good images are helpful for improving your search engine rank.
Be sure your multimedia artifacts make sense in context and provide valuable information for your site visitors. And optimize your charts, graphs, videos and images for SEO.
Don’t worry too much about having professionally produced videos or podcasts. Although the main pages of your site should feature professional images and multimedia, your prospects will appreciate seeing videos that feature you and your staff describing or demonstrating your products or providing helpful information related to your business.
Take a look — a good, long look — at your “About Us” page. But while you do this exercise, pretend you know nothing about your company. Or better yet, ask a friend or family member to look for you.
You might be surprised how many companies have “About Us” pages that don’t do a good job at summarizing what their business does.
The first one or two sentences should spell out explicitly what your business does, for whom you do it and the area you serve. When a visitor reads this text, you want to be sure there’s no doubt about what you do. If a prospect can’t tell what you do, neither can Google or the other search engines.
Even if you don’t have room in the budget to have your website redesigned or your web copy professionally written, consider having an SEO expert look at your “About Us” page. It should reflect the essence of your business, but it should also incorporate your main keywords and key phrases.
It’s been almost two years since Google updated its algorithms to favor sites that are optimized for display on mobile devices. Still, many companies have not optimized their websites for display on smartphones and tablets, let alone Apple watches and microdevices.
The majority of internet searches are conducted today on mobile devices. If you don’t optimize your site to be responsive across different platforms, Google will penalize you in mobile search engine results pages (MSERPs).
If you don’t believe this is important, take a casual poll of your friends, family, employees and customers to see how many of them use mobile search some or all the time. You can’t have a website today and not optimize for mobile. Yes, you can still rank well on a desktop or laptop, but by not making our website responsive, you effectively cut out more than half of your prospect base — or more, depending on your target customer profile.
Of course, Be Locally SEO has many more tools and techniques at our disposal to help you increase your website rankings. Contact us today to learn more or to request a complimentary consultation for improving your search engine rankings.