In the ultra-competitive world of search engine result supremacy, ensuring your website ranks as high as possible for the terms your target audience is searching for is paramount! Not to mention the often hundreds of factors that search engines like Google and Bing use to determine your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) fate. Here are 10 key factors that we believe will help you maximize your website’s visibility and impressions this year.
Quick Load Speed
We’ve all been there, one bar on our phone, a page for a local restaurant you want to make a reservation for just won’t load, but the next one down pops right up. Not only is load time a detriment to the user experience in areas with lower data availability, but it doesn’t look good to a search engine trying to optimize its users’ experiences based on where they are located.
Website Security
Not only are consumers (and their credit card companies) increasingly savvy about website security for anything involving a transaction, it is a top priority for search engines. The results displayed top of search are in fact a product that search engines are delivering to consumers, who expect safe, trustworthy, relevant results listed first. If a SE cannot tell if you are a safe site or not, they won’t list you first. Make sure your site is an HTTPS site (the S stands for security) to encrypt your user experience.
Mobile-Friendly Site
If your product is business to consumer, chances are a large chunk of them are seeing your website on their mobile device or tablet rather than a laptop. Search engines know this, and so they often prioritize websites they have analyzed and can tell will create the best user experience across the most devices. By adding in breakpoints for mobile-sized screens, or developing a mobile version of the site, you can capture more audience.
Ensure Crawlability
They say you can’t walk until you crawl, and that’s certainly true on the internet. SE’s are constantly crawling the web searching through a website’s publicly-available data that are used for SEO in order to keep everything up-to-date. If there is contradictory information in multiple places on your site, or it SEO-critical information is protected from view, they can’t crawl the data and your ranking may suffer.
SEO Page by Page
Having a homepage that checks all the boxes for SEO supremacy is great, but to really get ahead, try thinking about each page on your site as its own opportunity to amplify your message. Analyzing each page’s SEO can send a stronger set of data to SE’s as they crawl, so make sure you look for missing metadata, links that are broken, and contradictory data. It is also important to implement image labeling and keep it consistent and integrate keywords into copy or metadata wherever possible.
Add Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a new way to specify fields of data that will auto-populate once triggered by user searches. It could be a relevant special your business is offering that pops up below your website name in a search, or even your business appearing in a search you otherwise would not. An example of this would be ticket prices or showtimes for an event featuring an artist a user searches for. The possibilities are endless, and not only help users find more relevant information on the first page of searches, but it broadens where and to who your site will appear.
Reliable Information
Even a business owner with the most dedicated following could miss a sale or two because of outdated information pulled by a search engine. Did you know that many consumers rely on the search result page alone as a source for a business’ hours and location? Make sure search engines can easily see your key information so it will always pull the correct information when customers search.
Quality Site Content
This may go without saying, but having quality content that many users consistently find helpful is a no-brainer. Not only will more quality content provide search engines with more content to crawl through and to match keywords with for results, but it will ensure users stay on your site for longer, also boosting your search results.
Network of Backlinks
Not only will having backlinks, or links from other sites to your site, provide more opportunities for users to find your content, but it will also signal to SE’s that your site can be trusted and is more likely to have relevant information. It is important to not only focus on the quantity of backlinks you have but also the quality of links in that they are coming from reputable sites.
Accessible to All
Accessibility has become a big factor in SEO in recent years, as more and more users are switching to smartphones for their website usage, which can take advantage of website accessibility features to customize the user experience based on accessibility options they selected in the settings on their device. SE’s love sites that are accessible to the widest audience possible, so sites that it crawls and finds to be flexible and fully accessible will take favor over other websites.
In Conclusion
SEO is really part art and part science, and there are many ways that you (and your competitors) can work to position your website as close as possible to your audience. They could require a small amount of effort or take a specialized team, but the results are worth it. Reach out to us for help, our pro team can get your SEO in shape for 2022 and beyond!
