When your website has finally gone live, you’re excited! You’re thinking that traffic is going to flock your way, conversions will increase, and business will be booming. Well, this isn’t typically the case, unless you have a strong strategy in mind for getting people to see your website. How is this done?
Search engine optimization (SEO) uses powerful and well-thought-out strategies to increase your online presence and guide search engines and users to your website.
SEO includes a wide array of strategies, each with a very similar purpose in mind - get Google to position your pages within the search results and get users to click on your pages. If you want to get your new website noticed on search engines fast, you should follow the tips we have outlined in this article.
What is SEO?
SEO is vastly different from advertising (like pay-per-click ads) or social media optimization. Businesses rely on SEO to organically rank on the search results pages generated by search engines. SEO is the strategy of optimizing a domain and its pages to help Google’s bot crawl each page for search results and increase the user experience.
Each search conducted on Google gets a list of pages with likely sources that are relevant to the searched keyword. These sources are typically links to websites, blogs, videos, or images that are somehow related to the keyword. Google filters these links based on hundreds of factors in order to deliver the absolute best results for users.
Why is SEO Important?
In case the above mentioned didn’t clarify the importance of SEO, I’ll mention it here. Proper SEO is very important in acquiring search traffic and conversions on a local and national scale organically. If your business fits into either of these categories, then you’ll want to apply SEO in your grand scheme of things to get your website noticed on search engines. When working with these marketing strategies, you’re sure to gain more business, start beating your competitors online and solidify your position as an authority in your industry.
I will let you know, though, SEO requires time and lots of it in order to get pages ranked on the search engine result pages (SERPs). But, when done right, can prove to be a great long-term investment that offers incredible value to your business.
SEO Tactics
SEO isn’t necessarily simple, however, there are simple tactics you can use to easily get your website noticed on search engines. Whether you just rebranded your website or you launched a new website, you can utilize the following strategies and tactics in your business plan.
Include Appropriate Keywords
SEO has everything to do with keywords; this is the main point of SEO. If your website’s pages aren’t optimized with the proper keywords, this is definitely something you should take care of right away. You’re not going to get noticed on search engines for your products/services or industry if you don’t include the keywords on your website.
Let’s take Midtown Dental’s website for example. For each page, this dentistry included keywords that tell visitors and search engines that they are a business in Sacramento, CA working in the dentistry business.
Here’s an example of their homepage:
Right away, you can see which keywords they’re focusing on. As you continue throughout the other pages, this is the same and you can see that “Sacramento” is the most focused keyword because this is the location they’re trying to rank for.
Include keywords that relate to your business, what you do, and where you conduct your business (where your business is located and areas it serves).
Create a Sitemap
There’s no better way to get noticed quickly on search engines than telling them exactly where to find your website and all of its pages. In this case, you’ll want to create a sitemap and upload it to Google Search Console (GSC).
Google will automatically find your website, over a period of time, but in order to get your website seen faster, you should create an XML (extensible markup language) formatted sitemap for Google’s search engine to “crawl” all of your active pages. XML is similar to that of HTML and I know what you’re thinking - no, you don’t have to know code in order to create an XML sitemap. Luckily you can use tools such as sitemap generators to help you create a basic XML sitemap that you can then submit to Google Search Console.
Google now knows you exist and where to find you!
Optimize for Mobile
Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile. This includes images, videos, content spacing, etc. You want your content to have easy navigation on mobile devices. Search engines like Google love domains that have mobile-friendly layouts in mind, it’s part of their ranking factors. Analyze the mobile version of your website and look to see if the content doesn’t fit the screen, if words are too close together, or if some pages don’t work properly.
You can use Google Search Console for this as well. Just look at your mobile reports to view errors associated with your pages, you might be surprised what you find.
Optimize Metadata
Metadata is referring to pieces of information that provide further information about content. When referring to web pages, search engines look at particular content to understand what a specific page’s purpose is. You need to describe what each page’s purpose is as an extra measure for search engines to divulge this information on search results.
Optimize both your meta title and meta description.
While Midtown Dental is doing a good job in optimizing their meta title and description for the keyword “Sacramento” in the above example, they could optimize it a bit better. By shortening their title and adding different keywords that better define the business, they could make it easier for users on both desktop and mobile to understand what services they offer.
Your meta title is what users will click when trying to access your page. In the meta title, try to always include your business’s name so users, and search engines, know who you are. The meta description is what describes what’s on that page. In the meta description, include more information about what users can expect from your business and that page.
If it’s your homepage, think about the different products or services you offer. Tell people who you are and where your business is located or serves. It’s all about the keywords, and you only have so much space to fit your description so make each word count.
Search engines can find your website and rank it way faster when you tell them who you are and what each page’s content is about, so do them, users, and yourself a favor and add those details!
There’s a lot of other easy optimizations you can do for your new website to get seen and start ranking on search engines, and you don’t need an expert to help you.
Author’s Bio:
Joseph Jones is the Digital Marketing Manager at Websauce Studio in Sacramento, CA. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Internet Marketing to then join Websauce in 2018. He has been writing for his personal blog and Websauce composing articles on various SEO and digital marketing subjects.
Currently, he is writing guest articles for a multitude of marketing companies in the hopes of developing new skills and presenting valuable information to audiences for both inexperienced and experts in marketing.
