How To Choose A Seo Strategy For More Web Visibility - Semalt Gives The Answer
Which points should be at the core of your SEO strategy?
To be able to implement a successful SEO strategy in 2020, you need to be well aware of current developments in Google. As soon as you start setting up a strategy from the right angle, you come to the real SEO specialist area.
To take you along in this, Semalt gives you tips for the most important optimizations that bring the greatest impact!
Google wants to see a user-friendly website
First of all, it is very important to think from the target group. After all, you want to show your products to your specific target group. For that you need to map out the search intentions of your target group. Make sure you visualize your ideal customer and organize your website accordingly.
For example, you must offer your visitors all possible information about a subject. This applies to both product pages, blogs and articles. Only in this way can you have certain pages fully matched with a certain customer profile within your website. Google is getting smarter and will recognize that your website is user-friendly, because you focus on the user's intention.
In addition to content-friendly web pages, it is also important to create a friendly website design. For this you can use your sketched ideal customer profile and ask your web developer to match the design with the search behavior of the target group. It is called UX (user experience) design and is also an important part of your SEO strategy. Would you like to elaborate on this first? Then view our article about the relationship between UX design in SEO.
Provide a website structure with focus
Google likes to see websites with a certain focus and / or purpose. Logically, this makes it easy to navigate within your website and that visitors can find all information about a specific topic directly. Think of your website as a nice, well-organized branch of different sub-topics that can all be scaled under the main topic. It is especially important that such a structure can offer one topic per page from an SEO perspective. Show Google that you have thought about the content of your website and don't let them wander your website unnecessarily! Do you want to know how to focus one page on a topic and how to make this return in the menu structure?
Stop thinking 'desktop'
The number of mobile website visitors continues to increase in proportion to the number of desktop visitors. In view of Google's Mobile First Indexing, which is constantly evolving, it is really important to think from the mobile version of your website. The mobile display of your website is therefore the first indexed by Google.
A good desktop website no longer means that you are easy to find in the search engines. Invest in a mobile responsive web design, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and ensure that you still provide relevant content on mobile devices.
The latter is not just a tip, because many marketers forget that shortening your content for mobile display can also have negative consequences. With incorrect implementation, you may not display the most valuable links, images or CTAs on your mobile website!
Add relevant structured data
Google's SERP is getting fuller and fuller. By that I don't mean that Google is expanding the number of results, but that more and more websites are putting their SEO up and running. In your strategy for 2020, it is therefore valuable to think beyond your competitors in addition to your basic SEO.
It is now very relevant and no more news that structured data; is good for the findability of your website. It has several advantages. In addition to visually enriching your search results, structured data makes it easier for Google to read additional data. With structured data you provide information in certain formats that Google likes.
Structured data can be the setting of frequently asked questions about a certain topic, reviews of your product or the recipe for a meal on a food blog. What is interesting for you? Google offers sufficient options in its structured data manuals.
Technical optimization
Technical SEO may experience some marketers as a stumbling block. After all, it takes a lot of time to implement optimizations and the code of your website simply does not contain nice images in between that make it easier to handle.
That is why it is good to set out predefined outline, so that you gain insight faster during your technical SEO checks. A lot of technical factors affect your SEO, but keep an eye on the following:
- Canonicals: Look in the code of the website and check if the canonical of the page refers to itself. In exceptional cases, the canonical should refer to another page, for example when you are dealing with multiple product pages.
- txt: Paste robots.txt after the URL of your home page and check that no one (in case several people have worked on the website) has accidentally excluded pages. Note the 'disallow' text for this. Do you want this page indexed in the SERP?
- Meta tags: This is the most important technical check for your website. The meta title and meta description should be set up properly, including your important focus keywords for that page. What information does the visitor want and can find on this page?
- Speed of your website: Google is making stricter demands on the loading time of your web pages. It has a direct impact on the user-friendliness of your website and therefore also has a major impact on SEO.
- Website security: Does your website have an SSL certificate? A non-secure website scares your visitors. In addition, Google then shows a 'not secured' link in the URL bar.
- Alt description of your images: Google would like you to help its search engine understand your images. You do this by providing the alt attributes of your images with relevant descriptions. Show that the image adds value to your page.
Build authority for advanced
Authority in SEO is no more than building a website that is trusted by your website visitors and Google. You can build that authority by working on your link profile on three levels: link authority, page authority and domain authority.
Make sure you collect links from platforms that are relevant and have built nice SEO value. Link value is built up by, among other things:
- the age of the website;
- the quality of incoming links on different pages;
- the popularity of the website;
- the number of pages on the domain.
In your strategy you include how you build your link profile. Are blogs relevant to you? News articles? Are you going to make a lot of relevant videos?
Measurable website as a starting point
Making your website measurable is extremely important in your SEO strategy. After all, without data you do not know whether your work has brought you to the desired result. Therefore, consider carefully which actions of your target group you want to measure.
Then it's up to you to figure out how to make that measurable. It is obvious for product purchases. You set a thank you.html URL. How far do you go in enriching your available data? What are your best landing pages? Which events take place on your landing pages and which parts of the page are or are not viewed and / or clicked on?
Once you can make those things measurable, you can only really make optimizations within your website. A crucial part of your strategy.
What are the SEO pitfalls for 2020?
As mentioned earlier, a lot of factors influence your SEO and that is why it is also very valuable to find out which actions are not good for your online findability. Semalt put them together for you, so take advantage of them!
Prevent internal page competition
Internal page competition is a major pitfall in SEO. We often encounter this and our customers usually do not know this. Internal page competition means that you focus multiple pages on the same subject within your website. This is very bad for your SEO.
Why? In this way you actually indicate to Google that you also do not know which page is the most valuable for that topic. This of course does not benefit the user-friendliness. Google will then always switch between your pages in the SERP around that topic. So take a good look at your website to see whether multiple pages are competing with each other and make sure that you focus on one subject on one page.
Good SEO strategy has no hidden landing pages
With regard to SEO, it is very relevant to create beautiful landing pages in which you tell everything about a certain topic. However, some marketers think that they can make smart use of landing pages, which they do not include in the navigation of the website.
This means that someone within the website can never get to that page by navigating to it. This is bad for your SEO and also indicates that it may not be a relevant page at all. It is only a matter of time before Google's algorithm starts punishing these kinds of tricks.
So think carefully about your landing page in advance, such as what value that page adds and where the page belongs within your website.
Purchase external blogs that are not of good quality
Publishing articles on an external platform is a good way to build domain authority. You collect links that point to your website, which gives your pages more value. However, we see that many websites post or purchase articles on external platforms that are not qualitative.
This means that the platforms have not built up any authority or that they contain irrelevant content. In that case it is not valuable to place on those platforms. Make sure you work out a careful link management plan in your strategy.
Focus on a topic and bring focus
It's good to focus your website on a general main topic. You then apply a logical structure to the rest of your website and offer all important information on this subject. Nevertheless, we see that many websites still focus on too general terms and do not go into depth anywhere.
Once you do this, you're actually telling Google that you can't offer everything to the visitors and often compete only with the biggest companies. It is much more valuable to focus on terms that are specific to your business.
This makes it easier to distinguish yourself from the competition and you automatically attract much more relevant visitors to your website.
Conclusion
Now that you know all the SEO strategies to get more visibility, you now need to apply them. So Semalt, your SEO specialist company has taken on this challenge to accompany you with SEO campaigns that are well adapted to your budget. Find out here how you can be accompanied and increase your visibility for more turnover.