5 Pillars for an Effective SEO Strategy

Given the umpteen benefits of ranking higher on SERPs, it’s no surprise that 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.

But here’s the deal:

Ranking higher on SERPs is no easy feat, especially for new webmasters. Why? Because things change rapidly in SEO, making it difficult to understand what best practices one should undertake to improve search engine rankings.

Fortunately, there are some easy ways to understand SEO strategies, drive organic traffic and rank well for niche keywords.

So if you’re a webmaster looking for easy ways to understand SEO strategies and stay ahead of the curve in 2018 and beyond, you’ll love this mini guide.

This mini guide to understanding SEO best practices will help you easily dominate search result pages in 2018 (and beyond).

So let’s dive right in!

1. Set up Google Search Console

First things first, set up Google’s Search Console.

Setting up Search Console will help you monitor and analyze your website’s performance, identify SEO issues and discover backlinks to your website. In addition, this is where Google will notify you should anything go wrong.

Now that you have set up Google’s Search Console, follow these tips to improve your site’s visibility and drive home torrents of traffic:

• Choose How Your Domain Shows Up: Take your pick of how your site shows up with the www prefix or without it on search result pages.
• Make Improvements in HTML: Look out for any recommendations pertaining to improvements to your title tags, and Meta descriptions. Also, look out for non-indexable pages on your site and remove them.
• Backlinks to your Site: You probably already know links are one of the most important ranking factors for Google. That’s why it makes sense to constantly build high-quality links to your site and monitor them. Look for websites that link to your site to see what kind of content they publish. Don’t forget to analyze your most linked web pages.
• Audience Targeting: Select your preferred website audiences based on their geographical region and their country. Keep analyzing your audience segment to make sure that you’re targeting the right audience at all times.
• Index Status: Check out how many of your web pages Google has indexed. Look out for any webpage that has been blocked or removed and fix them.
• Crawl Error Report: This is perhaps the most important thing you must do. Check Google’s crawl error report to understand the errors that were found at the time when your site was crawled by Google crawlers.
• txt Editor: Look out for errors and warnings and edit your robots.txt files.

2. Set Up Google Analytics Dashboard

Google Analytics is a free, flagship analytical tool offered by Google to help webmasters track website traffic, user behavior on their site, conversions and much more. Set up a Google Analytics dashboard to check out the demographics of site visitors to understand who your visitors are. Look out for the performance of your content by analyzing the dwell time (time spent on page) and bounce rate. And don’t forget to see which websites are referring the most traffic and what percentage of your website visitors are likely to turn into actual paying customers.

3. Optimize Your Website’s Speed

Theoffbeatstory.com found a strong correlation between average page speed and Google rankings.

Now that you know which sites have faster load times and which ones are preferred by Google, it makes sense to optimize your website’s speed.

Here’s how you can do it:

Use responsive templates and embed your site resources in HTML. Optimize caches and CSS script. Trim JavaScript parsing and remove all redirects. And don’t forget to optimize the images on your website.

Once done, check Google’s site speed test tool to see how quickly your site loads. Check recommendations by Google and implement the changes to optimize your site’s speed.

4. Optimize your Website for Mobile

In 2015, Google rolled out its Mobile-Friendly Update. And soon after this update was rolled out, approximately 50% of non-mobile friendly sites witnessed a steep drop in their SERP positions.

That’s why it makes sense to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool to see if your site is mobile-friendly or not. Here are some quick tips to optimize your website for mobile:

• Only use mobile-friendly images
• Ensure large and legible fonts
• Keep links and content uncluttered
• Ensure that your site is scalable
• Add a mobile sitemap

5. Optimize META description & Title tags

Your META description is the introduction to what your webpage is all about. Quite expectedly, it makes sense to craft meaningful META descriptions about your target audiences’ needs and optimize them to catch users’ attention right from the get-go. Follow these 3 easy tips:

• Add relevant keywords in your META description
• Craft engaging, readable and meaningful copy
• Never duplicate META descriptions

Let’s talk about title tags.

Title tags are super important. Why? Because it is the first thing that searchers see when they find your website in search results. We’re sure you don’t need any more reasons to optimize your title tags.

Start by putting your focus keywords in your title tag. Try to add exact match keywords in your title tag.

Why? Exact match keywords appearing in thet title tag have a strong correlation with Google search rankings.

Here are some other title tag best practices you must follow:

• Keep your title tags not more than 50-60 characters (including spaces)
• Don’t duplicate title tags
• Write relevant title tags
• Don’t stuff keywords in title tags.
• Ensure that your headline tags are different from your title tags.

Over to You!

So there you have it. 5 easy ways to understand SEO strategies. Now go ahead, use the learnings and stay ahead of your competitors in 2018 and beyond.

Is there any other SEO strategy that webmasters must understand and use? Please let us know in the comments below.