Whether you’re a marketing team of one or a small business owner, dedicating time to improving your online visibility can seem overwhelming. There are a lot of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips and tricks out there, but which ones are actually worth your precious time?
Today, we’ll take a look at 5 simple yet effective ways you can boost your online rankings and drive more traffic to your website! While these are beginner techniques, they truly are foundational to ANY search engine optimization strategy. Even seasoned marketers should take these items seriously and spot check these items each quarter.
Top 5 Beginner Todos For Increasing Online Visibility
1. Create A Google My Business Listing
Google likes it when you use their tools. Google My Business is no exception, and may be the most important! By setting up your own business listing, you are not only verifying with Google that you are a legitimate business, but also providing a quick way for customers to find important information about you online.
In order to get the most out of your business listing, make sure you:
- Claim your physical address.
- Add relevant images.
- Encourage reviews.
2. How About Your NAP?
I don’t mean you should actually take a nap (but if you need one then go ahead)! NAP stands for “name, address, phone number,” and Google likes when these important bits of information are consistent. And I mean consistent, down to whether or not you spell out the word “North” or abbreviate with an “N.” Three key locations to double check would be your:
- Google Business Listing
- Company Website
- Social Media Profiles
While you just plop your NAP information into specific fields when creating a Google Business Listing or Social Media Profile, it’s a bit more complicated when it comes to your website. Where should this information appear? Ideally, you would list your company name, address and phone number within the website footer. That ensures it is shown across every page of the site in a consistent spot. Another key location for this information would be your Contact Page.
3. Leverage Internal Links
Google and other search engines crawl your website with bots. These cute little bots (I’m guessing they’d be cute if we could see them) scan through as many pages of your website as they can find. This is only helpful if:
- There are easily accessible links to all your pages.
- Links from one page to another make sense and have context.
A great way to boost the visibility of your pages and help Google understand what each page is about includes internal links. This means that if, for example, you have a service page that mentions a related capability, you would include a link over to that capability page.
To make sure you squeeze the most SEO juice out of these links, give that link text on your service page some nice context. Instead of adding a line that says:
To learn more about our web design capabilities, click here.
You could say:
Our team’s award-winning web design capabilities allow us to deliver quality solutions.
4. Don’t Forget The Hierarchy
Search engines also crawl the keywords you are using on your website to figure out what each page is about. That’s how they know what results to show, what’s relevant to each Google search. To do this accurately, they assign a higher value to specific sections of content. Headers are a prime example.
Every page should have one and only one Header 1, which is the page title. After that, headers should be used to prevent your pages from being giant walls of text. Starting with a Header 2, you can nest your content in a hierarchy as it makes sense, like so:
- Header 2 content
- Header 3 sub content
- Header 3 sub content
- Header 2 content
- Header 3 sub content
- Header 4 sub sub content
- Header 3 sub content
When you are adding headers to a webpage, make sure they clearly summarize the content that is about to follow. With this in mind, you will naturally be using keywords that are meaningful.
5) Blog Monthly
Blogging monthly is a great way to expand the content of your website to address important topics, like customer questions, expert insights, and industry news. Not only is this great content for potential and existing customers to consume, it’s also great for you! Why? Well there’s a long list….
- You’re positioning yourself as a thought leader.
- You have even more relevant keywords on your website for Google to crawl.
- There are more opportunities for internal linking.
- Google likes websites that have fresh and timely content.
- You’ll start appearing as a result for a wider variety of online searches.
In order for your blog to be successful, it is critical that you write for your customers and not for Google. Search engine algorithms are always evolving, but the end goals is for them to be able to show the very best results. They do that by making sure that when someone lands on a website, they’ll be happy because they’ve found the information they want and in a way that’s easy to access.
Websites These Tips Won’t Work For
While these are great practices to implement for any website, you will not see as big of an impact if your current website is/does any of the following:
1) Not mobile friendly. Hopefully by now, you already have a website that is mobile friendly! Responsive design allows your website to dynamically shift to fit your visitor’s screen size.
2) Limited website accessibility.
3) HTTP vs HTTPS. Not only does Google show a “not secure” message for websites running across HTTP, they prefer to rank websites that have HTTPS (which requires a security certificate).
4) Experiences lots of downtime or slow loading.
5) Contains duplicate or spammy content.
This post serves as a jumping off point for marketers or business owners that are ready to take on their marketing strategy once a well-functioning and properly designed website has been implemented.
