5 important elements to a successful SEO strategy

In order to have a good SEO strategy, you need to know how your site is currently performing. Once you know this, you can start to look at what is not working well and what can be altered to improve this. Below are a few suggestions on elements of your strategy that you can work on yourself, to start to improve your rankings.

An audit will help evaluate the site in multiple areas. It will help to uncover weaknesses in the sites’ ability to be crawled by search engines and identify areas to improve usability.

Audits should be performed regularly as external changes can impact your site’s performance. Therefore, regular updates and maintenance is required to keep it performing well.

They can help identify low speed and security issues within your site both of which can impact how a user will interact and click through your site.

It’s also vital to make sure that Google Analytics and Search Console are set up correctly so they are actively receiving data from your site. Google Analytics will help you to understand how users found your site (acquisitions) and gives you extensive information on their demographics, and conversions. Whereas Search Console will show popular queries that people are searching for in order to find your site and will show issues that you may possibly have when a search engine crawls.

Keywords and the importance of them are something that you will see pop up time and time again when looking at SEO. The impact they have on your whole strategy and how successful it will be cannot be overlooked. They also cannot be done once and forgotten about, the most important part of keywords themselves is relevancy, to be relevant they have to be up to date.

When you implement new keywords, keep an eye on how they perform and start to learn the phrases people are searching for and which to use.

They are also important to give Google an insight to the topic of a page. The more relevant your topic to the search query the higher chance you have of ranking above a website that is lacking in rich keyword relevant content.

Make sure that your page copy is relevant, and do not neglect to include keywords in meta titles, descriptions, headers and featured snippets. However, make sure that you do not overwhelm your user. Improving your page titles can make them more relevant to the search term and therefore make them more appealing to click, giving you higher click through rates. This is especially important for when pages are not ranking or getting as many clicks as they should be. You can look at what pages are performing or are not performing well through your Analytics.

Backlinks are links that are on sites other than your own which link or reference yours. They help to establish your site as trustworthy and as a legitimate source for your product or service. With backlinks, you need to make sure that they are on sites relative to where you would want your business to show up as they can affect customer opinion of your brand.

A good way to look at backlinks is to research competitors and see where their links appear.

Do not forget internal linking, this is important for ranking too, as your site won’t rank highly if the search engine cannot understand the hierarchy of your pages. Internal links connect your content in an organised way, you control it so you can guide users to pages you want.

In order to be successful SEO has to be organised. To get content onto your site to help improve your perceived quality and relevancy for certain keywords, it is best to plan. If not, you can find that you can include too many keywords – known as keyword stuffing – and repeat content.

Your on-page SEO can help identify where there are gaps in your content, and what to strategically add so you can start to rank better in certain areas.

Plan engaging content through the year by using a content calendar. Once you’ve identified areas, you can put them on the calendar so you know what you have written previously and possibly give yourself topic ideas by creating content pillars.

From this SEO base, you can then build the rest of your content by reflecting those targeted topics in your social media posts. Another way to find topics is to have a look at your competition, have a look at what they are doing, how are they performing and how are you different from them?

Understand your user experience in order to understand why there may be high bounce rates on particular pages.

There are tools available which you can use to run diagnostics on your website, such as page speed. You can test how quickly your pages load, if the page speed is slow then bounce rates will likely be high as users tend to lose interest if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

You can also ensure that it’s mobile and device friendly, most people do not view on desktop, so the page needs to be responsive if not a lot of users will leave the site.

For more information on how KH Digital can help with your SEO strategy, get in touch today.