Sara
Taking your SEO techniques to the next level is an endeavor that requires immense patience and careful attention to detail. Many of the techniques may seem simple but will likely require a level of understanding of your website’s content and visitors that one can only achieve through hours of analytics.
Once you have a solid foundation and consistently positive results from your current SEO-upgraded content, taking the next step can be just as much work as the initial set-up, but with only marginally better results. It’s important to remember that the more advanced SEO techniques you apply, the smaller the difference each of these changes will make. However, numerous small changes add up to significant results in the long term. Once you get this far into SEO, it becomes a game of inches.
The Current State of SEO
SEO has changed dramatically over the last few years, and will likely continue to do so. Google constantly updates and tweaks its algorithms to prevent companies from abusing any existing methods designed to exploit it. With every change Google makes, your approach may have to adapt to accommodate. Luckily, there are plenty of specific practices you can apply to your business’ website that remains dependable and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It’s rare to see major changes to how SEO works, but it is still essential to stay up to date on the latest trends in copywriting.
If you’re looking at more advanced SEO techniques, you likely understand the more common techniques. Things like using keywords, researching competitors, and improving your content will help lower bounce rates on your website. These are a great start, but to improve from here, you’ll need a deeper understanding of your website’s traffic. Specifically, you need to take a hard look at your website’s landing pages and the amount of time users spend on each one.
Performing a Site Audit
Once your website has a solid foundation for SEO, your next step should be to run a site audit. This is best done once you have enough data to make it worthwhile. There are plenty of services that will do this for you; however, it may be beneficial to run a basic site audit yourself in the interest of saving money.
A site audit is simply an analysis of your website’s performance regarding ranking on search engines. Having great content and using relevant keywords can only take you so far, and a site audit will allow you to find and address problem areas in your website and further optimize them.
Performing a site audit can be tedious. It requires you to know what to look for, plus a certain amount of technical expertise to fully understand your website’s data and enable you to apply a meaningful change to the website. Despite the time investment required, learning how to do a site audit is one of the most valuable tools that you can have to help your website get more visitors.
A site audit can provide you with a wealth of information, much of which can prove invaluable in the long term. With a proper understanding of your visitors’ habits, you can easily curate your website’s content to cater to what your visitors are most commonly looking for. Having this information means that should you hire outside SEO copywriting services, you already have relevant data to give the writers.
Performing a site audit isn’t easy or quick, but it is one of the most essential SEO techniques that you have to improve your SEO.
Optimizing Existing Website Content
Many websites, especially those for small businesses, were initially created with minimal attention to SEO. One of the first things that many people notice after a site audit is how many existing articles are performing poorly. It may be your first instinct to eliminate this content, but this is rarely the best approach. Instead, look to optimize this old content for the current SEO techniques. Content that is outdated or created as filler can negatively affect your website in several ways. Even if it shows up on search engine results pages, visitors may realize the content is no longer relevant and search for the information elsewhere.
Since there is still a demand for the outdated content, reworking it can provide a quick and easy way to improve your website’s SEO. Updating the content and adding relevant keywords may only take a few minutes of your time but can significantly improve the page’s conversion rate. You can also do something as simple as reformatting an article to help with your SEO. Making simple but constant adjustments to existing content can be extremely valuable and completed quickly.
Getting in the habit of checking old content instead of merely focusing on new content is a cheap and effective way to improve your SEO and conversion rates at the same time.
While optimizing old content is useful in many cases, don’t get into the habit of generating sub-par content expecting to adjust it later based on performance. By the time you’ve made the right adjustments to the content, you may have lost out on thousands of potential visitors in the 3-6 months you spent gathering data on the page.
Getting high-quality content that’s already search engine optimized is still your best bet to increase web traffic and conversion rates. Many people hesitate to spend the money on the best SEO content writing services. However, this expertise often pays for itself. Instead of having a page generating minimal traffic for six months before it is “fixed,” writing it well could have increased your traffic during those six months. Then you can go back later and make adjustments to improve it even further.
This framework is especially valid for small businesses who may not always have the luxury of time to spend hours pouring over your website’s traffic analytics or have time to generate top-notch content. Particularly with small businesses that cover a specific niche, copywriting services for small businesses will often pay for itself with the increased exposure that just a handful of well-written content can give your website.
Mobile Ranking
The number of users accessing websites from mobile devices has steadily risen over the last several years and will likely continue to do so. With more and more people using devices like their cell phones or tablets to browse the web, it is more important than ever for your website to be optimized for mobile usage. Of course, before you focus on your website’s mobile ranking, you should ensure you have a solid technical SEO foundation.
As phone usage increases each year, it’s getting to the point of necessity that your website is mobile-friendly. In the past, many people would be willing to put up with poor mobile browsing experiences. Now, with so many websites designed around the mobile experience, many will simply leave your website in search of one that is easier to navigate on their device. Google is aware of this trend as well, and with more people browsing on mobile devices, websites that aren’t optimized for mobile usage will automatically take a hit when it comes to SEO.
Unfortunately, mobile ranking is not always the kind of thing that you can improve simply by creating relevant content. Increasing your mobile ranking will likely require someone with web development skills to create a desktop and mobile-friendly website. So, although creating a mobile-friendly website may not cost you hours of work, it is likely something that will require a financial investment to outsource.
Utilizing “People Also Ask”
A new feature you may have noticed the last time you Googled something is the “People also ask” drop-down menu that appears near the top of almost every Google search page. Previously, Googling a question would simply give you a list of 10 relevant links. However, Google now uses a complex algorithm to generate a small list of adjacent questions that people may have also asked.
For example, if you Google “Can you change your own oil?” you will get relevant search results on how to change your car’s oil and if you should do it. But you will also get a list of similar questions such as, “Is it safe to change your oil?” and “Is changing your own oil worth it?”
This new feature is another aspect you can utilize for your website. Targeting these results can also be a boost to your website’s traffic. If your website covers a unique niche, you can even rank twice on the first page, should you have the relevant keywords and the answer to the question being asked. That’s why it’s important to curate your content to address adjacent topics at the same time.
Google’s algorithm looks for websites that are an authority on a specific topic. So, curating your content around a particular niche and using the PPA as a guiding feature is definitely worth your time.
More Content
As your website grows, it’s important from an SEO standpoint to give your visitors a reason to come back. The more content you have on your website and the higher the quality of the content, the more likely people are to come back. Though this sounds simple, as most beginner SEO copywriters find out, it’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. The amount of content you need to continue growing your website traffic and conversion rates can seem massive. In most cases, it’s simply impossible for one person to do it all by themselves, outside of smaller businesses and small blogs.
Regardless of analytics and how carefully you are crafting your content for keywords and searchability, you simply can’t move up Google search results without generating substantial content. That’s why hiring a team of copywriters can be so valuable. Not only are you freeing up your time to work on other aspects of the business, but you are also leaving the more tedious aspects of content creation and copywriting to experts that know the ins and outs of SEO techniques.
It’s not just grunt work that’s necessary. A higher level of expertise is the most significant benefit of using content writing services. All you need to do is provide the writers with the information needed to craft compelling copy. Then, a professional writer can take full advantage of all the available SEO techniques to increase your website’s search ranking.
Use What Works Best For You
By far, the most useful and effective thing you can do to increase your website’s SEO is to be adaptive. Google’s algorithm for search results is just one of the hundreds of aspects that are constantly changing. Focusing on the technical side of SEO and being aware of trends in your industry will make a massive impact. Even things like crafting content for the time of year can be a huge help. Being able to identify an under-utilized niche or trying an approach that caters to your unique visitors can lead to success almost instantly, should you get lucky.
All the techniques that you will come across in your search to improve SEO are excellent guidelines to help you understand how to improve those numbers in a general sense. However, the quality of the content and the willingness to adapt and make changes will lead to sustained and long-term success on your website. You need to create content that people enjoy reading, not just content that is aimed at Google search bots. Both are important, but if your goal is to have your website generate revenue, only human visitors will help in this endeavor.
