Creative Digital

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a huge game player in content marketing, and if you’re not using it, you’re behind schedule.

What is SEO, Exactly?

SEO is way to increase organic growth and traffic to your website through search engine rankings. SEO is the practice of increasing, growing, and driving traffic to a website through organic search engine results. Organic traffic is traffic coming to your website that you don’t have to pay for. You’ve probably noticed that when you Google something, ads are the first things to pop up in SERPs (search engine results pages). These ads are run by Google AdWords, which is a digital advertising service that lets businesses pay them to place ads on Google search engine results pages. These are paid advertisements, and are considered non-organic ways to bring traffic to your website.

SEO sends organic traffic to your website so that you don’t have to pay for it. There are certain things you have to do, though, to get your page ranked high in those oh so worthy Google search engine results. If you’re new to SEO or are trying to figure out how to drive organic traffic to your website, these five tips can help guide you in the right direction for increased traffic to your website this year.

Update Regularly

Google’s bots are constantly crawling the web looking for new, fresh content. How often you update your content will have an effect on how you rank in Google search engine results. This is why you need to update your website regularly and optimize all the content for SEO.

The more often you are updating your website, the more likely search engines will be visiting your page as Google bots re-evaluate your position in search engine rankings. Remember: when it comes to SEO and Google, content is king. If you don’t have high-quality, fresh, and relevant content, your search rankings will take a direct hit.

Metadata

SEO metadata is the data that appears on SERPs when you search for queries in Google. Metadata includes the meta title (title of the page) and the meta description (the text below the title of the page on Google). After doing your keyword research you should try to optimize your meta title and description so that they are more likely to appear higher in search engine results.

A part of your metadata includes your keywords. You need to place keywords in the content of your text so that when Google bots search your website they pick up on keywords that are likely to appear on search engines. Meta keywords appear in the HTML code of your website and tell search engines what your website content is about.

Link Building

Backlinks are important factors that determine how a website ranks in search engine results. When a reputable website links out to you, it tells Google that the content on your website is reliable. Remember: there is a correlation between the number of links to your website and the search traffic your website receives. There are certain things you need to keep in mind when link building, including:

• authority of the website linking out to you
• the linking website’s relevance to your content

Links can help build your reputation and your relevancy. Link building, though, is an ongoing task that needs to remain consistent in order to maintain search engine rankings. When Google sees that your website has not been linked out to for some time, it can affect your rankings.

There are many different link building strategies you can use to receive backlinks (external websites linking back to yours). Here are some strategies that could work for you:

• reviewing products or services by influencers in your industry
• promoting your content and creating high quality content
• developing professional relationships with other influencers
• asking friends, family, and partners to link to your sites (note: backlinks from websites in your industry have more value than links from sites unrelated to your niche)

Remember, the more backlinks you have to your website, the more likely your website will rank higher in search engine results. You just have to use the right strategy!

Go Mobile

Google themselves have said that mobile is the way to go for your business and your website. 1.2 billion people around the world are accessing the internet through their mobile devices. This means that if your website isn’t mobile, you will be missing out on potentially half the user base that is using mobile. Why? Non-mobile friendly websites also result in bad user experiences, which means that users are more likely to go to a mobile-friendly website that is easier to navigate through.

Google also prioritizes mobile websites. This is huge in SEO and means that Google rewards websites that are mobile friendly.

Increase Site Speed

A website’s load speed plays a big role in search engine rankings. This is because a website’s speed has a direct impact on a visitor’s user experience. Google tends to rank sites with slow site speeds lower in search engine rankings. If you want to compete with the major competitors in your industry, your website will have to be up to par with theirs.

Don’t take my word for it, Google themselves have stated that page speed is a factor they take into consideration in their mobile first index.

Use SEO the Right Way

If you are a content marketer or are re-evaluating your digital marketing campaign, your SEO strategy is something you have to perfect. Improve your organic traffic and Google search rankings by using effective SEO strategies and reap the rewards.