SEO Decoded The term gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Many business owners “think” they understand SEO, but its only about 1/3rd of what it all entails. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Which means, you are optimizing your website to be favorable to the search engines. In turn, your website will be locatable when your customers are looking for your product or service. You are appeasing the search engine gods. Optimizing your website comes in 2 different flavors:
We will break each one of these SEO categories down as there is much to be learned below the surface. Onpage SEO This is the common misconception about SEO as a whole. Most business owners think that throwing up a few paragraphs and some nice pictures on a website will fulfill the SEO requirement to be found online. Painfully wrong. The way I like to put it, you can build a fantastic ship but if its at the bottom of the ocean nobody will find it. Or better yet, you build a beautiful ship and it sits at a desolate dock on a desolate island where nobody can see it, let alone find it. What you need to do is build a road off of the main highways (Google & others), add a few billboards along the way, maybe some flashing arrow signs, and then people can find your fancy business website. But how do you accomplish that? Onpage SEO is the physical content you have on your website. Keyword-heavy written content is one primary example. Others are:
So back to the original question, how do you do onpage SEO? You can hire us :) or you can take a course in SEO and take on the responsibility yourself. It is quite a large undertaking and can get quite complex, but once you do it a few times you start to get the hang of it. Offpage SEO Offpage SEO can get a little more technical. But in a nutshell, offpage SEO is other websites pointing to your website. We call these backlinks. Other websites on the internet linking back to your website. Some key things to remember with offpage search engine optimization:
All of these aspects will determine the quality for the crawlers, and its best to optimize every where you can. The traditional “blog comment” backlinks are not as valuable as traditionally they get flagged or deleted rather quickly and aren’t really considered permanent. The anchor text is very important as that is what will tell the search engines what your website should be known for. Like if you have a website about gardening and all of your links have keywords related to masonry work, Google will be confused and you won’t rank for the terms that you want to. Having an analytics tool such as Ahrefs is recommended as this will ensure you are optimizing your website properly. Onpage and Offpage SEO
Combining both of these techniques as a whole will skyrocket your website to the top. Having high-quality backlinks that are done consistently every single week is your best bet to get (and stay) on top of the search engine results. Organic SEO is King Pay Per Click is great, but once you turn off the hose the traffic stops. SEO is permanent. Once you do it, it’ll always be there. While you may have to update and continue to backlink and optimize/update your site, it is worth it. You can dominate even over the paid advertisers online in today’s market. Not many people are willing to invest in high-quality organic SEO. Everybody wants the “quick fix” which is PPC. Don’t be like everybody else if you want to win the traffic game, invest in SEO for your digital properties. To learn more, visit NationwideAutomation.com. We have turn-key SEO packages ready to purchase to take the burden off your shoulders. while we do the heavy lifting.
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It was awfully nice for Google to give us an update heads-up this time. Its being called Page Experience, and may drastically affect your rankings. But Google is constantly updating its algorithm, why does it matter this time? The new updates include bounce rate and website usability as the key metrics. You are probably saying to yourself, “but that was already a part of their metrics wasn’t it?” Yes and no. Bounce rate has always been there, but not really a tally in the way that Google shows results to searches online. What is Bounce Rate? Bounce rate is essentially someone coming to your site and leaving almost immediately. So if your bounce rate is 100%, everyone who comes to your site leaves. According to Google, bounce rate is categorized as someone coming to your site and visiting at least 1 secondary page. You obviously want to have the bounce rate as low as possible, which shows that people are staying on your site and engaging with it. If they aren’t that just tells Google that your site is not what users expect after they click on it. Maybe its spammy or just doesn’t match the description of what its supposed to be. Top factors that can affect bounce rate are:
Dead links and grammatical errors are something many business owners aren’t even aware of that may be affecting the experience potential customers are going through when they land on their main page. Many just “set it and forget it” which is not the mentality to have when it comes to a business website. Ongoing updates and new content must occur monthly in order to stay relevant in the eyes of the search engines gods. Ways to Improve Bounce Rate
Now that you’ve realized that bounce rate is significant for customer experience, but also for site ranking, what can you do about it? There are some basic tips you can put into place today to bring down your bounce rate dramatically.
As you can see, these are simple improvements you can make quickly to prepare for the upcoming Google algorithm update. View your site from the perspective of a prospective customer and it will make more sense. For instance, adding a catchy video to your intro can help provide more information and keep users on the page longer. What is Website Usability? Another huge part of the update is overall website usability. These can be simple things like a pop-up blocking a key piece of material on your site. Or an inactive button or dead link in the footer. Pay attention to the details and compile a list of improvements you can make, or contact a reputable digital marketing agency for a free review. Usability can cover different aspects such as:
As I mentioned, if you are unsure of any of these aspects, its best to bring in the big guns, a professional marketing company that can do a full review as well as fix the issues quickly for you. But if you choose to take it on by yourself, run an SEO diagnosis here. Google will continue to update its algorithm for years to come, so its something we need to work with, love it or hate it. Google is the largest traffic highway on the internet, so in order to get high quality traffic for searches, we need to put our best SEO foot forward for our websites. As with anything in business, if you don’t keep up with the latest changes, you will be left in the dust by your competition. |
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