You have a website yet it still seems that customers are not finding you online. Just like in real life, having a good product or service does not automatically mean that you will get customers. Businesses still need to market themselves to make themselves more visible than their competitors.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process by which a brand makes its web presence more attractive to search engines.
This, in turn, allows the brand’s web pages to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). With most search users only viewing the first pages of SERPs and rarely clicking anything below the top three results, a superior SERP rank is essential to capturing search traffic.
Modern search engines such as Google are invested in their user experience. They want to ensure that the pages that they display to their users are relevant, informative, and easy to use. Therefore, a big part of SEO is tailoring your website to fit industry best practices, while the other part of it is persuading search engines of your value.
On-Page SEO
When search engine robots visit your page, they record critical information about it to later determine whether it will be relevant for a search query. On-page SEO refers to the tweaks that you can do to the visible content and HTML code on your website to improve how a search engine evaluates it.
Early attempts at on-page SEO were clunky and unsophisticated. You may still come across these poor examples of SEO today, where a rambling list of keywords is stuffed in the header and footer of a page. This not only makes your brand look unprofessional but also has little effect on the polished algorithms of Google.
Keywords
Keywords remain extremely important in establishing relevance. However, they need to be naturally blended into your page content. Keyword density is a fine balance—go overboard with repeating your keywords and Google may actually mark you down. Where you place your keywords and how you space them out make a significant difference as well.
Meta Tags
As search engine algorithms become more advanced, meta tags are less influential than they used to be. Nonetheless, they are still crucial to SEO. Meta title and description tags condense the content of your page to a simple sentence (or two), helping search engines to establish relevance. Well-written meta tags should not only contain target keywords but also persuade viewers of the SERP to click through to your page.
Heading Tags
Structure is another essential aspect of on-page SEO. Google wants to know that your content is properly formatted and easy to understand. Therefore, the use of heading tags (H1, H2, and so on.) is strongly recommended. Heading tags help your users and search engines to grasp the key structure of your content. Using keywords in your headings—conservatively—can also increase your page rank.
Writing for SEO
You may have noticed by now that a large chunk of on-page SEO revolves around ensuring that users are pointed towards the most relevant and informative pages. Hence, it is safe to say that to improve SEO, you need to fundamentally focus on the value of your website. Is your content helpful, credible, and readable?
In today’s world of search, content is king. SEO writing is the method of creating purposeful content that is designed to rank on the top of SERPs. Through SEO writing, brands can produce quality content that is both interesting to a human audience and appealing to search engine robots. A win-win situation!
To start writing a piece that would attract your target audience, you need to first identify the topics that are important to them. Think about the search intent of your audience and try to give them the answers that they seek. Then, you should spend some time researching keywords that give your content the highest possibility of ranking well.
The direct benefit of publishing more helpful content is that it will attract a larger audience. Readers on your page will share and forward your content, bringing in more organic referrals. As your page is shared, the legitimacy and reputation of your brand will rise, leading to more consumer trust. If you can keep it up, increased conversions will follow.
The less visible, but equally vital, benefit of publishing well-crafted SEO writing is that search engines will view you with more positivity. When you add outbound links to authoritative third-party pages in your articles, you show search engines that you keep credible company. Useful pages are also more likely to receive backlinks from other reputable sources, proving to search engines that your site is a veritable source of information.
Crafting pages for your website to impress both readers and search engines can be challenging. However, its benefits are huge. Increased visibility leads to more traffic, higher conversions, and ultimately an improved bottom line. If you are not ready to take on SEO by yourself, enlist a professional SEO writer. With careful planning, SEO can help transform your website into a digital marketing machine.