How do I get my website to be higher up in search results, allowing potential customers and clients to find my business? Effective SEO and keyword optimization.
Algorithms decide how high your website will rank in search engines, and strategically adding in keywords is a simple and budget-friendly way to nudge the AI in the right direction.
Here are our 5 tips for updating or creating a high-ranking website by yourself:
1. Find Website Keywords
Determine Your Audience
To start figuring out what your keywords are, determine what your niche is and who your audience is. In other words, how does your business uniquely solve your customer or client problems, and who are your potential customers? For more information on finding your audience, see our blog post on How to Advertise a New Business.
Brainstorm Your Keywords
With your niche and audience in mind, brainstorm a list of your keywords. Think about what the average person will type into a search engine to find businesses like yours, and be specific. The more specific your search terms are the more likely a person will find and purchase what you’re selling.
Using generic keywords will lead to big competition over customers, and it puts you too early in the buying cycle. For example, early on in a decision to choose a yoga studio, someone might search “yoga classes near me” and wind up browsing the websites of large gyms. After some research, they would more likely search with specific terms like “Bikram yoga” or “spiritual yoga.” At this stage they are more likely to be ready to buy something. So in this example, a great website page title would be “Tampa Yoga Classes” with a subtitle “Spiritual Yoga.”
Use Keyword Research Tools
There are a number of free and paid keyword tools that can help you research the best keywords to include on your site. Tools like these can help you see what people are searching and what your competitors are doing.
2. Add SEO Organically
With your list of keywords in hand, it’s time to write some copy!
Write your content like a human. Don’t try to stuff in so many keywords that the text doesn’t read logically. It’s best to write keywords and SEO into your website naturally to avoid being flagged by the algorithm, as well as to keep your page readable for potential clients and customers.
Most importantly, make sure you’re writing quality content on topics that people are actually searching for. Find out what your audience needs, and meet that need.
3. Optimize Mobile-Friendly Pages
A mobile-friendly website will rank higher in search results. In fact, search engines will ignore a website that is not mobile-friendly.
For SEO, this means making sure your keywords are included on the mobile version of your website since Google prioritizes mobile-friendly pages.
4. Update Sitemaps & Request Recrawling
Once you’re done adding or revising your keyword-rich content, you need to make sure Google is indexing and using the newest versions of your web pages. Update your site map, and request recrawling.
5. Who to Hire for SEO and Keyword Marketing
If this is all overwhelming or you just don’t have the time, consider hiring someone to do it for you. A marketing company can do the keyword research, adjust or create content for your page, update your sitemaps, and request recrawling all in one package.
Paradise Web has lots of experience successfully boosting websites higher in search engines. Contact us today to get the details on our custom-tailored plans.
