How to Make a Website SEO-Friendly to Increase Your Revenue (2020)

Regardless of the size of your business, you will need a solid digital marketing strategy to expand your outreach and attract high-quality leads. Brick-and-mortar stores are dying their natural death as online marketing channels take center stage.

However, as you become familiar with the online scene, you are bound to face a slew of challenges in marketing. The world of digital marketing can be trickier than what you might have expected. In case you want to create successful online marketing campaigns, you can begin with one of the best weapons in your digital marketing armoury: search engine optimization (SEO).

What Is SEO?

SEO is exactly what its abbreviation portrays it to be, .i.e. how to optimize a website for search engines. Search engines (mainly Google) are the middlemen that connect business websites with prospective clients. A user can type a query like the “best fishing rods in Grande Prairie” in Google. In response, Google goes through millions of websites and ranks them in order of their relevance to the search query.

Naturally, companies on the first page of the search results receive a large number of customers due to increased traffic. Even if these companies appear on that page for a single query, it can add a much-needed boost to their traffic and (eventually) revenue. So, how to make sure that you rank high on these search engines? This is what SEO is all about. It involves a wide array of practices that improve your rankings on these search engines. SEO facilitates you to:

• Attract users that can become long-term clients.
• Gain greater exposure and visibility for your brand.
• Drive organic, targeted traffic from your industry.

To excel at SEO in Grand Prairie to boost your revenue, consider the following strategies.

1. Engage in Keyword Research

More than 15% of Google’s ranking algorithm focuses on keyword usage for SEO. This means you should place keywords throughout your content that are likely to be searched by your target audience. However, do refrain from overstuffing or else you may have to pay the penalty instead. This means you need to go ahead with an organic approach so that your keywords fit naturally into the content.

Due to fierce competition, it is necessary to base your keyword strategy around long-tail keywords, .i.e. keywords consisting of three or more words. For example, if you manage a hardware shop, then you can pick a long-tail keyword like “the best hardware shop in Grande Prairie.” On the other hand, if you merely try to build your content around a keyword like “hardware shop,” then you are likely to fail. This is because it is a generic keyword that will not link you with your target audience and due to the amount of competition; you will always struggle to capitalize it.

2. Optimize for Mobile

The demand for smartphones has increased so quickly that it has entirely outpaced laptops and desktop PCs within a decade. It is estimated that more than 60% of Google searches originate from mobile devices. This is why Google has begun ranking mobile-optimized websites higher than before.

For optimization, you need a responsive web design in Grande Prairie. In this way, your website can render itself according to the device your customers are using.

Similarly, you need to implement AMP (accelerated mobile pages). AMP facilitates content on mobile websites to render quickly by using simplified HTML. E-commerce websites have found great success with AMP; they reported around 20% increase in their sales figures after applying AMP to their sites.

3. Boost Loading Speed

The time your web page takes to load is important. If your site loads slower than usual, Google’s crawlers (search engine programs) are quick to identify this fault, resulting in a decrease in your ranking. More importantly, it derails your user experience. Your visitors end up having negative interactions because, let’s face it, no one has the time to wait when there are other sites with fast loading speeds.

If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, around 40% of its visitors will abandon it, while 80% will never return again.  Slow load time is caused by the inefficient use of pop-ups, plug-ins, and streaming videos.

On the contrary, if you manage to get a reliable service for web design in Grand Prairie, it can ensure that your web pages load quicker than ever, engaging visitors with a positive user experience that warrants repeated visits.

4. Create High-Quality Content

If you have a website for your business but you don’t update it regularly with content, then it is easy to understand why your competitors are ahead on the SEO war. To increase your site popularity and have your clients connect with you regularly, you need high-quality, relevant, and original content. Remember, content is the king. Fresh and compelling content always makes its mark and stands out from the rest, helping you beat your competitors that invest large amounts of money in paid ads. Content relates to any of your text, including those on your primary web pages, blogs, social media pages, etc.

5. Optimize Your Images

When it comes to grabbing a user’s attention, images perform admirably well for your site. However, you have to ensure that your images are optimized properly. To do this, you need to look into their overall size and file format. Images with large size can cause your site to load slower than usual. Hence, you need to compress and resize your images before uploading them. Keywords are used with images to name them in terms of alt-text and image description. These meta-details are especially useful when your image fails to load on a user’s screen. In such a scenario, your target user can read the alt-text tag and get an idea of the image.

6. Begin Blogging

Any business in Grande Prairie that has a powerful online presence regularly publishes blog posts. It is a marvellous tool for lead generation, and it assists you in getting a tremendous number of visitors to your site.

By establishing a considerable group of interested readers, you can generate a significant amount of traffic on your website daily. Additionally, you will be able to implement other SEO techniques like image optimization and keyword placement. Blogs allow you to:

• Keep your site fresh and updated.
• Make people stay longer on your website.
• Target long-tail keywords.
• Use internal and external links.
• Connect directly with your audience.

7. Split Up Your Content with Header Tags

Header tags are an essential part of HTML that distinguishes the different types of headings and sub-headings on a web page. They begin from h1 and end at h6 and follow a top-down hierarchical format. If you ignore their format, then it can damage your on-page SEO. For instance, if you follow an h4 tag with an h1 tag, then your hierarchy is in tatters, which means that your headings are no longer SEO-friendly.

These tags are also useful in other ways. Headers enhance the user experience in a site. They are used to separate content and make it more readable. By adding headers, you can improve the visual appearance of your site.

Lastly, many businesses use header tags to contain their keywords, which is more effective than putting them in the paragraph body.

Keep in mind that each page should have a single h1 tag at max, where the other tags can fulfill heading requirements.

8. Employ Internal Links

Google goes through links to identify the type of content on your website and what value does it bring to the table. Essentially it “crawls” through different websites by going from one link to another with its bots. It can visit the homepage of site, render that page, and navigate to the first link. In this way, Google navigates through links and determines the relationship between all the posts, pages, and other content on your site.

It is absolutely necessary that you aid Google in evaluating your website by applying an internal linking strategy. You have to utilize the correct internal links, so Google can assess the relevance, relationship, and value between pages.

At first, you need to decide what the structure of your website is and divide it in categories, like a pyramid. Afterwards, you need to figure out the most crucial content. This is the content that you need people to reach out to while they search about your brand information, services, and products. When you are done with the assessment, you can place multiple links with it. Afterward, follow these tips.

• Place contextual links in related items. For instance, if you are promoting a list of the “best gaming headphones” on a page, then you can add a link to “tips to buy a gaming headphone”.
• You can add modules and plug-ins that mention related posts to your posts.
• You can add links from the top navigation or home page; it is a ploy to make your content more authoritative.
• Organize your website by adding internal links with categories and tags. These taxonomies improve Google’s understanding of your subject matter. By going through tags, Google can know your exact industry and domain.

9. Place External Links

Hyperlinks that target other sites (other than the one it exists on) are known as external links. Whether a website links to you, or if you have linked to another website, both forms of links are known as external links. External links hold more weight than internal links. This is because search engines surveys have repeatedly shown that websites attain high rankings because of this strategy. One of the reasons behind this is the fact that unlike other SEO components, it is harder to manipulate external links. When your web pages are linked in any other credible website, then search engines improve your SEO ratings.

Historically, Google’s PageRank algorithm counted hyperlinks as popularity votes. This means that the page with the most links pointing towards it, scores the most on the popularity scale. Hence, in this way, these pages would often come out on top in SERPs. However, today external linking is a lot more complex. Some of the metrics that search engines use in 2020 for external links include its popularity, trustworthiness, anchor text of the link, relevancy between the target and source pages, root domains linked to the target page, ownership relationship between the target and source domains.

10. Add Multimedia Elements

Don’t restrict the type of your content to text and images only. Wherever, you deem it suitable, add audio, videos, slideshows and other multimedia elements to your website. All of these components greatly enhance user experience. Make sure to especially focus on videos because video marketing has become a real thing. Consumers have made it clear that they like to watch videos as the find it easier than reading.

Final Thoughts

Today, SEO is among the leading marketing components of any brand, whether it is an enterprise or a small business. The amount of customers it can bring to a brand is astonishing to say the least, something which was unfathomable in the days of brick-and-mortar stores.

However, as a business owner in Grand Prairie, you might have realized that while SEO is an extremely effective marketing channel; it can be complex for beginners. Considering it has the potential to boost the revenues of your business to newer heights, you can benefit more from an experienced, reputable service that specializes in Grand Prairie SEO. For this purpose, contact Elevated Web Solutions, a digital marketing agency that has spearheaded SEO in Grand Prairie for a lot of clients with tremendous success.