Look Around: Home / Blogs & EGuides / SEO

SEO or search engine optimization enhances your online content to increase your website's visibility through a search engine. SEO means changing and formatting small things that will help boost your website's performance. Search engines are run by algorithms that take certain factors into account when ranking sites for specific keywords. Optimizing your digital platform to work with these algorithms will make a massive difference in bringing more traffic to your website. 

Search engines (Google, BING, Yahoo!) change their algorithms regularly to optimize results for their users. The more users enjoy the engine, the more they will use it. There are SEO tactics that worked a year ago that may be less and less effective as algorithm updates are released. It's important to spend your time optimizing your website for the factors users and in turn, Google will always prefer on your website. Here is a list of a few factors that Google will always favour.

Content Marketing

In most companies, their content marketing and SEO efforts are two different strategies, but they must go hand in hand. Creating content is the best way of marketing and building a brand that people feel they can trust. Through YouTube videos and blog posts, viewers get a better understanding of the brand. With these platforms bringing such success, content marketing will always be the foundation in which Google will consider your relevancy to the keywords your customers are searching. 

Having social media as a driving force in your marketing is extremely useful, with around 3.6 billion people using social media today, over 40% of the world’s population is on a platform. This number is only going to exponentially increase as time goes on; establishing a strong social media presence through content marketing is crucial. Using videos for install guides or Q&As will help your clients feel more confident with your service and it will land you more hits with search engines. Social media is also a great way to create strong backlinks to optimize your platform further.

Blog’s are another great form of content that is an excellent SEO tactic; not only can you focus your writing to have specific keywords for search engines, but guest blogging and backlinking is a surefire way to push your website to the next level. Blogging gives you an advantage for SEO, provides information to your customers, and gives your brand personality.

Pro Tip: Ensure you post your content on your website first.  It’s important that Google recognizes the content’s primary source was your website.  Then share the link to your social media platforms.  This helps build the authority of your website.

Site Speed

Your website speed is essential. Speed is a direct factor in Google's ranking process, which means you need your website to be fast. Google has reported that 53% of users will click off a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Increasing speed will reduce the bounce rate on your website while improving your ranking with search engines. If you want to check your speed, you can go to Google's site speed analysis tool here. 

 How can you increase the speed of your website? Quite a few factors contribute to website speed; our top picks are server response time and image compression. Server response time is not something you can control; whoever you use to host your website will determine the server's speed based on their technology. The more space your pictures take up, the longer it takes to load them. You want to make sure your images load as fast as possible while still maintaining the look. Image compression is decreasing the size images take up while retaining the image quality. Several image compression tools are accessible with a quick search. 

Backlinks

High-quality backlinks are the backbone of an SEO campaign. According to a survey of SEO professionals, backlinks are the most significant part of SEO. Backlinks are a way to garner reputation and rankings within a search engine. When Google released its Penguin algorithm, the quality of backlinks became much more critical. Ensuring that your backlinks are from reputable and secure sources is crucial to improving your ranking within search engines. While we are seeing more evidence that Google is devaluing backlinks overtime due to agencies "gaming the system", we still see benefits when we deploy a targeted backlink strategy.

 Titles & Meta Descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions are the links and descriptions that are displayed when you search on Google. It's your first chance to entice someone to click through to your website, but they are also integral to your SEO. You want to make sure is that your title and description relate to your service. Search engines look for keywords in both the title and description to match a user's search. Each page on your website should incorporate unique keywords based on the content of the page. The goal is to have each page rank for different keywords pertaining to a specific service. This will ensure that your website is visible when users search for terms related to your business.

Aside from the SEO benefits of titles and meta descriptions, they also matter to the people seeing them. When a user searches ’ roofing company’ they want to make sure that what they are clicking on is a good fit for them. Your page title and the description give an immediate impression to a viewer. Being concise while remaining appealing is very important here.

Tagging Headers

One of the least recognized SEO tactics is correctly formatting your headers into h1’s, h2’s, and h3’s. These headers are ranked hierarchically with h1’s being the most important for SEO. When a search engine combs your website, it factors in headers; if your headers don't reflect the order in which you intend your information to be presented, you will appear much less often for search queries.

Your H1 should contain the keywords that are most important to your business, as the algorithm will prioritize those keywords. Your h2 is a subheading to your h1 and should contain similar keywords, with the h3 serving the same purpose for the h2. Although it may seem quite minor, it has a significant impact on search results. Tagging these properly is crucial for showing up regularly in searches, as well as your SEO ranking.

Conclusion

Some aspects of SEO shift through time due to the constant updates within search engines. I can tell you that content marketing, site speed, backlinks, titles and meta descriptions, and headers are going nowhere anytime soon, and will continue to be invaluable in driving traffic to your website and bringing you more sales.