What Continual SEO Tasks are Needed for Success
You’ve likely heard before that SEO work is never done. You always need to work to optimize and improve your website. And that is true. As soon as you stop website work, it’s likely that you’ll drop off the first page within a matter of months. But you don’t always need to work on your code. You don’t always need to continue to improve every paragraph of copy every single month. There are certain SEO tasks you need to always work on in order to continually improve your website.
High-Quality Content
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Good content is the #1 Factor to get you ranking high on Google. Good content matters. And it’s continual. We offer these great articles as a help to all who read, but it also helps us with our own SEO efforts. You can do the same with the content on your website!
Let’s break it down. Content tells visitors and Google why they should visit your website. It tells website visitors and Google why you’re better in your particular industry or expertise than your competition. Content includes website copy, blogs, photos, videos, product descriptions, and more. The Google algorithm takes all of this into account as it evaluates where to raise websites in the rankings.
There’s no hard and fast rule about how often you need to post new content. It depends on your industry, your location, your competition, among other things. Just posting regular updates, to the best of your ability, is better than nothing. You don’t need to post new content on your pages as frequently as you might need to for a blog. But those product or service pages are often where you put your most important keywords. So keep that in mind when you’re creating that copy. (we’ll get into keywords further down)
I’ve used the phrase “good content” a few times now. Good content versus just posting for the sake of posting are two very different things. Good content is easy to understand, conversational, helps you to connect with people. But it’s also a place for you to demonstrate your expertise. Long-form content does well for readers and for rankings. These types of blogs go into the weeds and the details and provide actionable insights and information for your readers.
When looking to continually improve your website, start with figuring out how you’re going to improve your content and make a plan from there.
Keyword optimization
Going hand in hand with good content is your keyword strategy. Just identifying an important keyword and typing it over and over and over into a blog post isn’t the right strategy. In fact, it could actually hurt your site. This is called keyword stuffing, and it’s not good SEO practice. Tracking your keywords and seeing its growth is one of the best ways to track the success and progress of a campaign.
You first need to identify your main keywords you want to rank for. You also need to identify secondary keywords, also known as halo keywords. As you rank for those, it boosts your main ones and your overall SEO improves as well. The more keywords you get to page one, the more traffic, and hopefully customers you will get.
And even though it’s an important keyword, some are harder to rank for than others. You need to keep in mind your competition, your location, and how much traffic you currently get. As you build up the authority and ranking on your site for some less competitive keywords, then you can target the bigger and more difficult ones. To learn more about how to conduct keyword research, read our guide here.
So as you create new content for your site, keep in mind your overall keyword strategy.
Metadata and Alt Tags
This strategy also ties into maximizing your content. But it’s probably one of the most important ways to get your content noticed by Google. Alt text and meta tags helps explain the content on your site. It helps Google understand what a page is about before it crawls it. It helps explain the context of a video or image. Search engine crawlers can’t understand what images are, so the alt text improves visibility and helps the bots understand your site more.
Alt text, title, captions, descriptions, etc., sends information to Google. The metadata also helps your site improve rankings for both web and image searches. But also keep in mind with these types of tags, you can’t just stuff keywords in there. Keep in mind your main keywords you want to rank for. But you need to actually describe what your image or webpage is about.
As you create new content, new pages, or add in new elements to your site, you always need to optimize for the metadata and alt tags of a website.
Link Building
Basically all good SEO strategies involve link building. They’re considered digital votes of confidence to show Google that other websites trust yours. If you get a lot of links from other reputable websites, it can help Boost your rankings. Link building is a tricky process. Blacklisted website links will hurt your website. And you want to build a strong portfolio. So you have to continually work to improve your linking.
Keep these things in mind as you work on improving the backlinks to your website.
- Link Location – diversity matters for your links. Make sure you get then placed on various sources for users to find your site. Variety of links also helps to build your portfolio.
- Link Type – There are do-follow and no-follow links. You want do-follow links for Google to crawl that point back to your website.
- Content Type – Building a link portfolio on an assortment of content helps to build relevance and trust. You get these from blog posts, articles, infographics, and more.
- Link Schedule – a whole lotta links posted all at once on different sites doesn’t look good to Google. It signals bot activity. So work to strategically and in a timely manner get links placed.
Mobile Optimization
Did you know that Google will decrease the rankings of your website if it’s not mobile friendly? True story. More than half of web traffic comes from a mobile device now. So your site needs to be ready for that influx of traffic that comes exclusively from their phones or tablets. Even if your analytics show that a majority of your own site traffic comes from desktop, you still need to be mobile optimized. Google released this algorithm update in 2018, and so it’s common practice now to have a site that is also mobile friendly. Also having a mobile friendly website leads to higher conversion rates when people visit your site. More conversions and site visitors means your SEO campaign is working.
Local SEO & Business Directories
Did you know that approaching a campaign exclusively to optimize for local search is different than optimizing a website for a broad search? Depending on the campaign goals requires a different kind of approach. Local search includes terms like “near me” or a special local city, rather than a metropolitan area. It requires different kinds of keywords that specifically mention the cities you service. It takes into account local content and off-site tasks like customer reviews, public relations, advertising, and listing on Business Directories.
Another crucial piece to the digital marketing puzzle for your business is getting listed on all the relevant directories. Things like Google My Business in particular can greatly help customers find you and get answers to their immediate questions like hours, phone number, or address. There you can also see reviews from other customers that work wonders for driving new business. If you have a high rating, you’re much more likely to get new business than a competitor that offers similar services, but has a lower customer reviews. Business directories are where people search for quick information when looking in the general area, rather than for something specific. You need to make sure your business gets listed in these directories to make an impact locally.