This is 2020, and a significant number of people are on the internet asking questions and searching for products and services. When people search for information, products, or services online, they typically don’t exceed the first page of search engines in search of what they want.

According to Search Engine Watch, 94% of clicks that occur in search engine result pages go to organic results, and Hubspot highlighted that 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results.

This makes it crucial for you to be on the front page, always!

This shows that SEO is critical in today’s digital marketing world. If internet users (your customers) can’t find you, that’s bad business for you. 

What then is SEO?

What is SEO, and what are the Benefits of SEO for your Business?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization, which literally means optimizing your website for search engines as a way of generating traffic. SEO plays a crucial role when it comes to promoting, advertising, reputation management, and facilitating business growth. 

SEO techniques vary according to industry, business website structure, and the audience you’re targeting.

Many people focus their minds on keywords whenever they hear SEO; however, SEO goes way beyond keywords.

Search engine algorithms not only rate the relevance of the keywords on your pages and metadata to a searcher’s term, but they also evaluate information like website bounce rate, the duration visitors stay on your site, broken links, pages viewed, inbound and outbound links, readability and so many other off-page factors.

For you to inspire your visitors to stay and interact with your website, you need to create excellent content and improve the user experience and usability of your website.

If you’ve been working on keyword optimization for a while without getting the results you need, you may want to consider other factors that affect SEO ranking. Only then can you get results.

What are the Benefits of SEO?

• SEO improves user experience
• SEO builds brand credibility
• SEO establishes brand awareness
• SEO intensifies your brand reputation
• SEO ensures mobile-friendliness of your website
• SEO is one of the most effective primary source of leads
• SEO yields higher conversion rates
• SEO is cost-effective
• SEO improves your site speed
• SEO increases your social media followers
• SEO encourages local users to visit your physical store after their search
• SEO is a long term marketing strategy that yields results even after you reduce intense SEO strategy implementation.
• SEO increases your market share
• SEO synergizes all your online marketing activities
• Most of all, SEO puts you ahead of your competitors.

Ten Quick and Easy Ways to Improve Your Website’s SEO Ranking

There are so many SEO tips out there, and you can never know them all because they’re always changing with updates in search engine algorithms. 

One thing matters, however; that you’re implementing the relevant SEO strategies at your disposal. You can start small and scale from there. We always recommend that you get rid of ineffective SEO practices and black hat techniques and replace them with different efficient SEO strategies and result-focused tactics.

While these may not be the most mentioned strategies (depending on your industry), SEO revolves around these quick and easy tips. 

Let’s get started!

Start Blogging

The importance of blogging when it comes to search engine optimization can never be overemphasized. Blogging is critical because it gets the search engines to crawl your website more often and helps educate, engage, and inspire your audience enough to want to do business with you.

When you produce fresh, relevant, and consistent content, search engines will drive people to your website. The more these people stay on your website, the more search engines recognize your site as an authority. This keeps on increasing your website ranking in a positive feedback mechanism kind of way.

If you can establish your industry authority through blogging and get a large group of faithful readers, you’re sure to generate lots of traffic daily.

Write Engaging and Optimized Meta Tags

Meta tags are snippet-like contents that tell both search engines and readers what a page is about. It’s usually found in the page’s code. Unlike tags, meta tags are located in the HTML code of the page and are only visible to search engines. 

These meta tags include;

• Page title and 
• Meta descriptions 

The right meta tags should encourage search engines to rank your website and searchers to click through to your site. However, there are specific meta tag guidelines you should stick to for the best results. 

Some tips you should adopt while using your title include;

• Use only the 65 characters Google gives you while writing the page title.
• For the best click-through rate, put your keywords at the front where they’ll capture searchers’ attention.
• Keep it clear and concise so that the searcher knows what your webpage is about, from the SERP.
• Keep your meta tags consistent with the information on your webpage, to reduce bounce rate.

For your meta descriptions;

• Make them descriptive so you can capture searchers’ attention.
• Make them unique so you’ll differentiate each page.
• Make them short according to Google meta description limit of 160 characters or fewer.

Improve your Readability

Your contents’ readability plays a crucial role in increasing your dwell time, reducing your bounce rate, and consequently increasing your search engine ranking. 

No one wants to read something boring and stuffed with keywords. While trying to rank by using necessary keywords, ensure you write in a natural way that passes your message. 

Ideally, we recommend you write for both Google and humans. When you write for search engines alone, you’ll have unsatisfied readers who’ll eventually send signals to Google and affect your rankings.

Your readers want answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. If you can provide that, you’re good to go. 

With the recent Google updates being based on satisfying searchers’ intent, readability is more important now, more than ever.

Set Up Google My Business Account

For several businesses, local SEO is more crucial than worldwide results. This makes it vital for you to set up a Google My Business account with Google.

With an account on Google Business, you can edit your business information, verify your contact information, add business-related images, monitor your reviews, and chat with your customers.

When searchers search for location-based businesses on Google, you’ll get the chance to show up on the business listing area.

This also plays a role in enhancing the ranking of your website.

Fix Broken Links

It’s crucial to fix website errors, especially broken links. These broken links have a negative effect on your SEO. Even though Google sometimes say that website error won’t hurt SEO rankings, it does. 

Broken links affect the website profoundly, especially when the broken links have built up a lot of authority from the SEO page or internal/external linking. When you have links like this, you must fix them. Besides search engine ranking, broken links show errors, and these error messages give a terrible impression of your website.

For you to fix your broken links, you need first to identify the broken links, look for probable causes for the damage, and come up with working solutions.

Increase Your Page Load Speed

Page Speed is another user experience metric search engines pay attention to when it comes to ranking web pages. Modern-day internet users are not patient and will leave your website immediately if your page is taking extra time to load.

Recent research shows that 40% of website visitors will abandon a website if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

This makes it critical that you make your loading speed faster. When your loading speed is slow, search engines will notice it, and it’ll harm your ranking. They don’t want to direct their users to websites that are slow and gives a negative user experience.

Besides SEO, it’s crucial to give your users a great experience.

Use Various Forms of Contents

One of the mistakes website owners make is putting only written words on their website. This gives a poor experience because a great number of people will interact more with visual content. Listening and watching increases retention and engagement more than reading.

Add multimedia elements like images, slideshows, videos, and even audio to your website. All these will help improve the user experience, and consequently trigger search engines to rank you high.

Besides delivering a great user experience, multimedia files like images, videos, and recently audios have their own ranking system. When your multimedia is ranked on search engines, it’ll help in increasing your traffic.

Use both Internal and External Links

You may be wondering if we’re not going to talk about links. Probably, you’ve heard a lot about link building and its effects on SEO.

Links are essential for SEO.

There are two types of links that are critical to your ranking; external links that link from other websites to yours and internal links that link between your web pages. 

Outbound links are often considered more valuable compared to internal links because external links showcase what others say about you. This sends a signal to search engines that your website is authority enough to be recommended by other sites. 

Get inbound links to your website from authority sources. This is a concept called “passing link juice,” which is used to describe when an authority website passes some authority to another site. 

Use Relevant Keywords

Are keywords not the bedrock of SEO?

They are.

Keywords play a crucial role in improving your website’s SEO ranking.

Take time to develop a good keyword strategy, conduct in-depth keyword research, and use keywords relevant to your business.

However, you should be careful not to fall for keyword stuffing. Stuffing your website with keywords hurts your SEO; we recommend you make the use of keyword a natural part of your writing.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile

In recent times, mobile search has drastically increased, and a lot of search engine users are searching from mobile phones.

Consequently, Google has released updates that gave preference to the mobile usability of websites. This makes it critical for you to optimize your website for mobile search.

You can try compressing your codes, eliminating the use of flash, and compressing the size of images and videos. Furthermore, we recommend you get rid of pop-ups, which will inconvenience your mobile users.

Implementing all these tips for achieving a mobile responsive website will ensure your website adjusts to the mobile screen when it shows up on mobile phones.

Conclusion

Conclusively, with these ten quick and easy ways to improve your website’s SEO, you’re sure to gain an edge over your competitors. Do well to look out for other SEO strategies that work. Remember, you’re looking for ways to impress both your audience and search engines.

Do you need any form of assistance in implementing these strategies and more?

Synnefa Technologies is here for you.

We are one of the most reputable SEO agencies in India, and we assure you of the most quality service. Feel free to contact us right away to discuss how we can take your business to the next level.