So far, the digital marketing trends of 2021 revolve around devising a perfect SEO strategy.
SEO is the prime digital marketing tactic that can elevate the business standard and help reach its targeted audience.
Any discussion never goes without a perfect and transformable SEO strategy for the business.
Now with COVID-19 wreaking havoc, the in-person trades are coming to a complete halt. The pandemic led to severe financial disruptions to the companies regardless of their size.
At the same time, some are on the brink of collapse. Now, traditional brick-and-mortar businesses don’t have any option other than to take their business operations online because of the pandemic restrictions.
However, the sudden paradigm shift to online is adding new challenges for businesses. SEO steps in to assist the businesses in overcoming these challenges and competing with the digital competition.
SEO is the process of enhancing the quality and quantity of the content to maximize its reach to the targeted audience.
You see, users are always searching keywords or queries on the search engine to learn, find solutions, products/services, or even a business.
However, suppose your business’s website is not listing these search results that users are searching for. In that case, you are missing out huge.
SEO delivers to allow your business to rank in the search results so your audience can find your business easily and become potential customers.
Sounds simple right? Well, there are some things that every marketer should know before getting started. Simply optimizing the content is not enough to take your business ahead in the search rankings.
SEO requires certain factors to meet the standards and rank your site. With that said, let’s discuss some SEO hacks and crucial SEO ranking factors to grow your website’s traffic.
1. Targeting Right Keywords
One of the top-ranking factors for SEO is the keywords. SEO mostly revolves around keywords and content optimization.
As said earlier, users will engage with the business by conducting searches for keywords on the search engine.
Do not make the mistake of creating content that is irrelevant and defies the usage of the keyword. Moreover, your audience will not necessarily search your business by name.
They will be searching with the keywords for the solutions, products, or services to obtain the list of results from where they can choose.
Targeting these keywords is the best approach to get your site listed among the relevant results and generate quality organic traffic.
This process involves keyword research to find lucrative keywords.
You will need to identify the keyword difficulty and the search volume on the search engine.
This process can be complete using keyword research tools to gather the set of keywords. However, you will be able to use the keyword with the lowest difficulty and highest search volume.
The high difficulty keywords are already ranking for tons of websites and might not perform well for you.
2. Site Security
While discussing the crucial SEO rankings factors, site security is never an exception.
Search engines like Google use algorithms to show relevant and high-quality results to the users.
The main purpose is to enhance the user experience to find the best possible resource that they are looking for.
For that instance, the search engine regularly updates the algorithm to optimize the performance and delivering maximum value to its users.
In the recent update in 2014, Google shared information regarding giving more value and trust signals to the website with site security.
Since cybercrimes are an ever-rising problem, site security is crucial to keep a safe side from malicious digital threats.
Today, Google encourages business owners to use the latest HTTPS encryption with an SSL certificate to secure a connection between server and user.
Google’s standing to offer security will improve business credibility and reduce the risk of a potential cyberattack on the user.
3. Backlinks
Apart from enhancing security, Backlinks are also important factors that send the most ranking signals.
These are the link that is created by connecting the URL of your website on another authoritative site.
You might be wondering, how does that even work? Backlinking is more of a gaining vote of confidence from the higher authoritative sites to rank your webpage on the search engine.
That identifies by the crawler bots used by search engines like Google to index the page and rank them on the search results.
The bots’ main purpose is to crawl through the links on a web page and discover more pages to rank them on Google.
Otherwise, the crawler might never discover your page, thus avoiding ranking your website.
For that instance, professionals advise designing link-building strategies to improve off-site SEO.
This process involves posting content on the higher domain authority websites, which easily rank on the search results.
Having backlinks from these websites will send trust signals to take your content optimization game even further.
4. Page Speed
Most marketers think that they would skip on page speed and still rank higher on the search results.
However, the latest search algorithm update now gives more value to the websites with faster page speeds than slobby and slow websites.
Google is doing its best to improve the search experience for its user. Especially, suppose your game downloading site does not load faster on mobile phones. In that case, it can get penalized, which can hurt your rankings and business efforts.
5. Mobile Responsiveness
Since most people stick to their screens, they watch the news, work from home, or look for products and services online.
According to research, more than 230 million people in the US have smartphones. In contrast, 79% of users have made purchases from smartphones.
It adds the importance of expanding your target audience for all kinds of devices. A responsive website design is a simple approach to target all kinds of audiences, whether desktop, mobile phones, or tablets.
The responsiveness means that your website design should fit in the screen with all interaction media available to provide a quality user experience.
Google recently rolled out a mobile-first indexing update to rank mobile responsive websites for mobile users.
Final Words
SEO might seem like a slow and intimidating task. Still, it requires patience and persistence to pay the dividends for the long run.
Taking these factors into considerations will extend your marketing game and give more brand exposure.
Do not forget to keep tabs on the latest trends and strategies and leverage them for your business’s best.