6 Best Practices That Improve Your Site Visibility
Getting your business in front of the right people is crucial for success, especially in today’s internet-driven world.
Online visibility allows your brand to stand out, to broaden its reach, and to drive more conversions.
You can have the best business website, but if it’s not visible, then you’ll have a hard time attracting more online customers.
In this article, we’ll give you a few tips that’ll set you on a clear path to better search engines’ rankings, so you can boost traffic and win more business.
That said, let’s dive in.
Publish Relevant Content Regularly
Posting great content remains the most straightforward method of ranking high on Google.
Search engines expect you to publish helpful, engaging content regularly.
You need to have a publishing schedule that allows you to deliver valuable content consistently.
But before that you need to Plan, Write and Analyze Content in One Place
With this in mind, aim to create content that is:
- SEO-friendly – Posting content that isn’t optimized for SEO may not help your site gain an online audience. We’ll go into the details of SEO optimization later.
- Relevant – Outdated content isn’t helpful to your readers, and search engines may rank your website lower because of it.
- Comprehensive – Posts ranking in Google’s first pages often have word counts higher than 1800 words, studies show. Ensure your content is thorough and answers all of your audience’s pain points.
- Unique – Rehashing what’s already on the internet prevents your website from standing out. Engaging content, on the other hand, can get your business some potential customers, as it helps your brand build authority.
Sometimes, though, you may not have the time and energy to produce 1800+ word articles consistently.
If this is the case, then you need to consider refreshing your evergreen content. Improving your old blog posts offers an easy way to increase click-through rates.
You can make improvements such as fixing grammar errors, coming up with new titles, and revising publication dates.
These updates help Google know you have fresh content, prompting the search engine to bump up your ranking.
Cultivate a Social Media Audience
A simple way to get people to notice your business website is to post on social media accounts.
But you don’t have to actively promote your brand with every post. You can offer users helpful guides, and any other interesting content. You can also:
- Engage with your followers by asking relevant questions
- Answer your readers’ questions
- Reply to comments regularly
Although social media interactions aren’t a deciding SEO factor, they influence your rank.
The more shares you get on your posts, the more signals are generated that show your content is helpful to your target audience.
Aim to get your site noticed even by the followers of your followers. Eye-catching images, conversation-starting topics, and compelling captions can help boost your content’s appeal.
Also, when you mention a brand in your blog, you can inform the brand, so they can also re-post your piece.
You’ll be able to cast a wider virtual net, drawing in readers enthusiastic about your niche.
Leverage Long-tail Keywords
While core keywords have long dominated the SEO landscape, they don’t hold a candle to long-tail keywords.
Sure, short-tail keywords are still popular in low-competition niches, given they refer to broad topics.
But if you want your brand to get attention in a competitive field, then you have to be more specific – you have to use long-tail keywords.
Easier to target, long-tail keywords are slowly gaining traction.
Research shows that more and more people are moving towards long-tail searches. They’re using natural language to search their queries, following the growing use of mobile phones for surfing the web.
Google Voice Search, for instance, allows users to get answers through voice commands.
Such a development has to lead to more users using natural language to Google their queries. Optimizing your website for voiced searches requires you to include more long-tail keywords in your content.
Identifying specific keywords is easy when you’re using Wordstream’s free research tool. You only need to key-in the phrases you’re looking to research:
Wordstream gives you a comprehensive list of 10 of the most popular keywords. Give out your email address so you can receive the list of long-tail keywords, at no cost.
In a nutshell, adding long-tail keywords to your SEO campaigns is a clear-cut win-win: improved search rankings, high-quality leads, and more qualified traffic.
Competitor Analysis
Many site owners ignore competitor analysis, although it’s one of the more straightforward methods of getting more visibility.
A comprehensive analysis can show you where you need to improve your site to beat your competitors, rank higher than them, and drive more leads.
It allows you to reverse-engineer your competitors’ strategies and implement them in your SEO campaign.
Chances are, you’re probably ranking lower than your rivals because your SEO strategies are not as effective as theirs.
Check out this Competitive Research Toolkit for Free!
An analysis can be as simple as checking their article’s word counts, topics they’re focusing on, and keywords they’re targeting.
It’s cost-effective and offers you quick solutions to your current SEO problems.
For example, you can analyze the long-tail keywords they’re targeting in a very simple process. You can either:
- Scan their content to get a general feel of the keywords they target
- Use keyword-density checking tools like Yoast Plugin or Alexa’s On-Page SEO Checker
- Look for them in titles and snippets
- Search in meta tags in source codes
If you want to take your competitor study to the next level, then you can add SEO proxies to your arsenal.
They help you closely monitor your rival’s SEO campaigns without letting your actual IP address slip.
Your location will remain a secret, and you’ll be able to gain an edge over your competition.
On-page SEO Optimization
While it’s easy to get too caught up in producing your site’s content, you shouldn’t ignore the technical aspect of SEO, which may be just as important when it comes to getting organic visibility.
A few of the things you need to optimize include:
Page titles – Leaving out your keywords from your title can negatively impact SEO. Users may not know what your article is about, choosing other posts that best describe what they’re looking for.
Headings – Scanning content that doesn’t have any headings is hardly straightforward. You’ll often get mixed up. That’s why you should ensure your blog posts have several headings that break up chunks of text.
Page URLs – Try to make your URL as descriptive as possible so readers can find your site more easily when searching on Google. Like page titles, adding the main keywords is the best way to make it descriptive.
Images – An easy way to make complex content more engaging, without putting your audience to sleep, is to include images.
They make for an overall better user experience and offer you extra ranking opportunities, as your page can appear in Google Images.
Tread lightly, though.
Sometimes adding lots of images can come at the cost of your site’s loading speed.
Not all images are equally as effective, so you need to choose only quality images.
Title tags – You can easily overlook title tags when optimizing your page, given they offer very little to your ranking. Note, however, that poorly drafted tags can influence your SEO negatively, so ensure you optimize this element.
Meta description – It helps readers learn about your site. Make sure you have your keywords and their alternatives included when writing your meta description to give your site a better chance of ranking high. Also, stick to about 160 characters.
SEO Audits
Performing SEO audits helps you learn if you’ve optimized your site properly for search engines.
You can even check Organic Traffic Insights of your competition as well.
Too often, many site owners will perform an audit at the start of their marketing campaign then neglect It from then on.
To consistently outrank your competitors, ensure you perform these audits regularly. Guidelines can change on a dime. Google, for example, makes about 500 changes yearly to its algorithm, so you need to make your site up-to-date with the ever-changing guidelines.
A few of the practices you’ve been following from a few years back can be harming your ranking.
At least two audits a year are enough to show you what you’re doing wrong with your optimization.
They can bring up issues, like low-speed, duplicate content, and poor mobile compatibility, that may be jeopardizing your SEO efforts.
You can also get recommendations on where to improve your site to make it more visible.
Maybe you need to enhance its structure, target more keywords, or make it easier to navigate – a thorough audit can help point these out.
Luckily, you can do an audit yourself, so you don’t have to break the bank to get your site noticed.
Create a checklist of the most important parts of your campaign. Analyze each factor, checking if they’re any mistakes, and look for ways to make improvements.
Conclusion
Improving your site’s visibility can be an overwhelming undertaking – from unfamiliar SEO terminology to analyzing technical elements, there’s a lot to learn before you can get your site to rank at the top.
Hopefully, by sharing the above must-do practices, we’ve given you a handy blueprint that’ll boost your SEO game, removing several of your website headaches.
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