What’s the secret to great SEO, or search engine optimization? Everyone wants to know, and taking the wrong path can get you less ideal results than what you were hoping for. Google is the main search engine to rank in — it’s the number one website in the entire world, and it gobbles up over 70% of conducted searches for all sorts of products and services.
If you want your website to rank better in Google, you might have dabbled with a bit of basic SEO — you may have even tried hiring an SEO company. Without a real game plan, though, you’re unlikely to get the results you’re looking for anytime soon. After consulting with several SEO marketing agencies, we’ve come up with a basic three step plan to improving your approach to SEO.
1. Figure Out What Your Keywords Really Are
The entire premise of SEO is that you’re promoting keywords relevant to your site. Therefore, you want to be funneling your efforts into targeting the best and most relevant keywords for better ROI. One way to do this is to use Google’s adwords tool, which can see which terms are commonly associated with each other in search. Consider all the potential terminology one might use while searching for terms relating to your industry.
2. Make Sure Your Website is Up to Par
All the SEO in the world won’t help your website if people are getting there, and then leaving right away. Is your site quick, easy to navigate, and modern in appearance? When consumers have to wait 10 seconds to see a page, or you have a bunch of x-ed out links that make them question your legitimacy, they’re not going to go through with contacting you or completing a sale — they’re going to go to your competitor. Hire website design agencies if you need to — it will be worth the price.
3. Get Inbound Links From Quality Content, Website SEO Company or Not
If you can afford it, we recommend hiring an SEO company. If not, then there’s a few ways you can tackle this yourself. Inbound links are one of the ways Google figures out how “relevant” your site is to users. If a lot of other websites link to you while talking about pizza, you, the pizza website, must be important for this keyword. There are multiple press release websites that will allow you, for a fee, to create professional press releases that will show up in Google news results. You can also do guest blogging on other sites. Just make sure your links are only associated and linking back from quality content, not spam.
Have you considered hiring an SEO company or a custom website design company? Let us know in the comments. Great references here.
