By Cary Grant Implementing search engine optimization and getting the results from it can take a long time and is also a never-ending process. It is possible that one day, you may be on the much-coveted Page 1 of Google SERP, but the very next ejected from it if your competitors have got it right and displaced you. Many marketers love the promise of SEO bringing in more traffic, higher revenues, and exponential growth but are unwilling to acknowledge that these are all the results of following the SEO process.
Appreciating the SEO Process
You can liken SEO to physical fitness because like there are no shortcuts to achieving enduring physical health without taking serious risks. To achieve peak physical fitness, you need to create a plan and stick to it. It means you need to follow the right techniques and processes like eating right, exercising correctly, and continuously improve your performance. Similarly, you need to follow a process for achieving SEO success because unless you are ready to cut corners and face the consequences, there is no way to game the system. You also need a great deal of application and patience besides a sound strategy to bring home the SEO promise of more traffic, leads, revenues, and sustained growth. Some of the essential steps for implementing an New York City SEO Company strategy for enduring success:
Audit
You need to begin the SEO process with a technical and content audit. The technical audit examines all elements of the website that can potentially have an impact on the performance of your SEO. One of the elements many websites suffer from is slow loading speed due to content incorporating large images or heavy videos. When a website loads slowly, it leads to a high bounce rate that also damages its rank. By optimizing the file sizes of the images and videos or moving them below the fold, you can improve the page loading speed and conversions.
If your website has multiple pages, you should conduct a content audit that will help you identify underperforming pages. You can take decisions regarding keeping or dropping content, optimizing them, or rewriting them. Deleting content may lead to a fall in traffic, but you should not be worried about it because it was non-relevant content that would not have benefited you. Pruning non-relevant content will allow you to focus on optimizing content that will bring the results you want. By performing the technical and content audit, you will know what is broken so that you can fix them to rank better.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves many factors like crawl budget, crawl errors, index status, internal links, sitemaps, broken links, loading speed, and more. Since there are many things included in technical SEO, you need to take the issue holistically. Tacking one item is not going to do much for you. By improving the functionality, speed, and user experience of your website, you will boost your conversions. It is because users find your website easier to navigate and engage with. The technical audit will reveal the stuff that might be pulling down your site’s performance. If you address the issues, your site will be faster and facilitate search engine bots to crawl it better. According to Forbes, you should work with the website developer to fine-tune the site’s architecture.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential to the SEO process because, in its absence, you will have no clue how users search for your products and services or even for your business. You will get to know the volume of searches for a particular term, the related terms used for online searches, and the kind of ranks you are achieving by using keyword research tools. You can begin the process by trying to guess the terms your target audience may use to discover your business and then using SEO tools to validate your guesses. You can also research the competitor’s websites to discover relevant keywords. You can also localize your SEO strategy with geo-specific keywords. Keyword research helps you find valuable keywords that you can use to optimize your content that your target audience will refer to when they are in a buying mode.
Content Strategy
Your content strategy will dictate how you present your core content for the consumption of your target audience. It will typically be about the stuff that drives your business revenues. You can boost the utility and relevance of the content by researching what your customers expect from you, building content around those concepts, and infusing important keywords that make the content discoverable. You should also create a FAQ page to provide answers to questions your customers are most likely to ask. You should ensure you craft an SEO-friendly URL for the page, employ breadcrumbs, and make the page comprehensive. On a site-wide basis, the content you create should focus on what customers are looking for and be original and engaging.
Superior User Experience
The website needs to offer users an experience that they will find awesome and make them come back again and again. Your content presentation should be attractive and easily understandable to make potential customers love your website. The content should be relevant, informative, and easy to understand. Use an advanced navigation system to make the content accessible to users and search engine bots both. Make sure there are compelling calls to action, and you provide enough opportunities for the users to get in touch with you. The content you create should have a specific purpose so that you can drive the kind of conversions you want. At the end of the day, your target audience should find your website highly appealing, engaging, and easily understand what the business is about, what you offer, and provide intuitive access to all the information.
Conclusion
As will have perhaps become clear, there are no absolutes in SEO. The goalposts are constantly moving because the search engine technology is evolving, your competitors are trying to move ahead, and your potential customers are redefining their needs and what is important to them. The best way of ensuring success is to develop an SEO strategy and keep implementing, monitoring, and optimizing it by following the processes correctly and meticulously.