SEO should be an ongoing effort for every company. Making it part of your marketing strategy along with a pay per click campaign is required to keep your prospects funnel full. Optimizing your website over the period of at least 6 months is highly recommended just to stay on top of all the updates. In this article we examine 5 quick ways to boost your SEO so you can stay ahead of the curve.
Links
Backlinks still remain the most important ranking factor along with domain authority. How long has your domain name been live is the first question we ask. You need a minimum of 24 months before you can start ranking along with a large number of websites that link back to yours. To get links you can simply start by posting your url to citation directories. The absolutely necessary ones are Google My Business, Facebook, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Bing, Yext and Hotfrog. For most of these you will need to list an address with a phone number. Google and Facebook have the option to just specify a service area if there is no brick and mortar location. You can dig in further by finding more specific web directories for your industry and state. The majority of these websites are free to submit to but the process might become a bit time consuming and repetitive. It’s the easiest link building technique you are going to find. Others include starting an outreach campaign to news sites for articles, guest blogging, links from local businesses, edu or gov domains and hosting events can also help your SEO. That’s why here at Aeon Ads we offer services that will increase the number of your external links to boost your ranking.
Video
Video content has been growing in a very fast pace for the past couple of years and shows no signs of slowing down. Every platform offers video these days especially in short format (15 seconds) with subtitles. Taking advantage of this trend is crucial even if you are just doing a live feed from your office. The numbers are staggering. 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. Having video on your landing page increases the likelihood of showing up on Google page 1 by 53%. Get on board or risk being left behind.
Mobile
Everything you create or post has to be done with a mobile first approach. Don’t get me wrong the desktop version of your website still gets a considerable amount of visitors depending on your industry’s vertical but on a typical day 40% of people will conduct a search using only a smartphone. That search will most likely be done on Google and nearly half will leave your website right away if it’s not responsive and fast.
Content
Content is not always easy to get right. The thinking behind it is approachable but how you apply it can make all the difference. Larger pieces of content that are dense and with over 1000 words tend to rank higher. If that is not an option the minimum is at least 500. Sometimes updating and republishing old blog posts with new images and information will do the trick.
Keywords
Half of all search queries are 4 words or longer. That is very similar to how we speak in our daily conversations. For example a search for this blog post might be “SEO guide for websites” That is a long tail keyword (phrase) and around 70% of traffic comes from these type of queries. It’s important that you write quality titles, tags and headings using the appropriate words. Google’s keyword planner is the tool of preference for us but you can find many other alternatives that are free.
