Brand Health Checkup: SEO

Find your website landing way down the list of search results? It may be time for some site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) overhaul. (Say that four times fast.) While you practice that tongue-twister, let's untangle four areas you can focus on to improve SEO: keywords, content, user experience, and tracking.

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of SEO. Researching what your customers and audience search for online helps you determine what keywords to use on your website. Assign a primary keyword to each page on your website and use that keyword throughout the content on the page. Also, use primary keywords in the page title, URL, subheading, meta title, and image alt tag. And location is key! Use the primary keyword early in the copy – this helps search crawlers identify the subject of your page quickly and easily.

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "Content is King" – this is never truer than when it comes to SEO. When you write website content, keep a few things in mind. First and foremost: write valuable, useful content. Don't write to meet a word count quota. Write to answer customer questions. Doing this well takes time and resources, so invest in them and for the highest payoff. A few other content considerations:

• Publish content regularly and refresh old content to keep it up to date.
• Don't duplicate content on your site. If you absolutely must, use canonical tags to point to the original copy to avoid SEO penalizations.
• It should go without saying, but don't steal content from another source.
• Include graphics in your content. Make sure images have short descriptive file names and image alt tags = bonus SEO points!
• Use internal links on all your pages. These help users navigate your site and stay engaged with your content.

User experience can lift your SEO game. If a user can't navigate your site or find what they're looking for quickly and easily, it hurts your SEO score. That gives you two things to focus on: speed and clarity. Test the speed of your website to make sure pages load quickly. Large images slow a site down, so use nicely compressed images to cut load time. Create clear, easy-to-read content that answers readers' questions. If a visitor hits layers of copy and technical jargon, they often hit the road.

Part of the user experience revolves around sharing what they find. Don't make site visitors jump through hoops to share your content. Do the hoop-jumping for them – make it super easy to share your content on social media platforms and other websites.

So, you implemented keywords, created killer content, and built a user-friendly site, and now you track results. Use the tools and reports in Google Search Console to measure your search traffic, fix errors, and optimize your content. You can even set up alerts to notify you when an issue arises on your site. Google Analytics lets you dive even deeper into your organic traffic to optimize SEO. Skipping this step turns all your other work into a big guess.

Now you're ready. Tackling some site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) overhaul should seem simpler. (Still a bit twisty to say, though.)

If you feel a bit overwhelmed by it, reach out! We can straighten out your SEO efforts so they deliver the results you need.

PS – Be sure to catch up on our first two Brand Health Check-Ups: Email and Social Media