SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a practice of increasing a website’s quality and quantity of traffic through organic results in search engines, but it’s more than just using keywords in your content. You’ve got to master SEO by understanding your website, gathering the best tools, optimizing your content, and then staying ahead of the game. We’ve compiled a list of useful SEO tools and tactics to make managing your digital presence a little easier.
How to Test the Current Success of your Website
The success of your website depends on the meaning of success to you, and if your goals align with the site’s purpose. Are you looking for maximum readership, or are you targetting a small niche? Regarding statistical performance, your website can be measured using analytics software, like Google Analytics. Metrics will give you a clear picture of the efficacy of your design and content decisions. The metrics to be checked include:
- Call to action click through rate
- Average time on page
- The number of visitors
- The number of new visitors
- Bounce rate
If you measure, record, and optimize using web analytics, you will be able to determine the effectiveness of your website over time and make adjustments as they are needed. Of course, setting goals for yourself and understanding why those goals are important is key to keeping your SEO game on track.
How to Create Optimized Content
Creating optimized content is vastly undersold by many SEO experts. It’s not about the number of times a keyword appears in your copy, it’s about how gripping the copy around your keywords is to the readers. Here’s how to capture your audience’s attention:
- Create a catchy page title. This will increase the click-through rate.
- Optimizing content takes a comprehensive approach and focuses on the user. It involves keyword presence, proper metadata, and creating quality content that builds trust and authority.
- High-quality content is created after understanding your audience. Well-developed thought on your topic and should drive readers to your call-to-action. Fundamentally, your content should have proper grammar, correct spelling, and appropriate length.
- Make sure your content is not keyword stuffed. If the content is oversaturated with them, your content will read like an SEO-article, which is not good for your reader retention.
- The content should read well. Optimize the content for your readers to find their answers using headers and bullet points. Take into consideration the skim-readers and those whose intention is to learn quickly.
Keyword Research Tools
You wouldn’t build a house without a hammer, and you shouldn’t build a comprehensive SEO plan without the tools needed for the job. Here are just a few useful SEO tools that focus on keyword research to help you carry out your strategic efforts:
- SEMrush – SEMrush makes it easy to check in on which keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can also locate keywords that do well on Google and Bing.
- Ahrefs Keyword Explorer – It provides in-depth information on a keyword, such as the number of backlinks needed for the first page ranking on Google.
- Google Keyword Planner – Although it is designed for advertising, it can help in determining the keywords that are better suited for targeting organically. It also provides ideas on keywords and helps with SEO.
- Moz Keyword Explorer – Identifying keywords isn’t its only use, it provides extra suggestions not found anywhere else. Its features also identify the number of clicks expected from a keyword.
- KWFinder – It’s an easy-to-use tool. Perhaps its most useful feature: Keyword Difficulty, gives you the difficulty of a keyword to rank in based on the SEO strength of other sites. It can also help you to customize your keyword research to your local area; for example, to target a city, country, or state.
WordPress or Other Plugins Available to Help Optimize Content
Your site’s loading speed is essential to its success. WordPress plugins are designed to improve the performance of a site. There are a number of these plugins, such as:
- WP-Optimize – This plugin helps to maximize efficiency by cleaning up your WordPress database. It can remove unnecessary data such as spam comments, post revisions and defragment your MySQL.
- WP Smush – Images need to be compressed. WP Smush does that without sacrificing an image’s quality and integrity.
- WP-Rocket – WP-Rocket, as its name suggests, increases site speed and page load time across multiple websites.
- WP Fastest cache – The highest-rated free cache plugin is also easy-to-install and improves site response time.
- WP Super Minify – It reduces loading time by combining and compressing CSS files, JavaScript, and HTML.
- Autoptimize – By minimizing your site’s assets like JavaScript files, HTML and CSS Autoptimize improves your pages’ load times. A cache plugin can be used, to further reduce load times.
Topic Clusters
Algorithms of search engines are continually changing. Search engines now favor a focus on an interconnected set of topic-based content. This alters the previous SEO strategies.
Topic clusters are interlinked topics around similar topics. It starts with the main topic (Pillar Content), your most important piece. A set of content relating to your main pillar page is collected or created. The content will be focused around your pillar piece.
To create a topic cluster, follow these steps:
- Create a pillar page on your topic. In case of your current posts, look for one with the highest traffic. The cluster content will cover one aspect mentioned in your pillar page.
- Sub-topics can be organized into main pillar topics of about 5-10 sub-topics per pillar. Keywords can be important, but keywords strategy operates under the topics that drive SEO to your pillar content.
- After designating a pillar page, repeatedly linking to it in future content forms a cluster around it.
- Over time, you can track the page’s ranking in the search engines to see if your clustering is working.
Stay up to Date with SEO News and Best Practices
Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms; so, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve by staying informed on SEO best practices. Stay on top of new trends; the SEO game can alter in a day’s notice!
Keywords have been the main foundation in creating content, but changes are happening. To keep yourself updated, you can use the following:
- The best websites and SEO experts can provide the valuable information. Examples include:
- You can get new updates relating to SEO trends by registering for Google alerts, which will go directly to your email whenever changes occur in the SEO world.
- Using Twitter to connect with SEO experts can be beneficial. Follow the profiles which provide the latest trends in SEO, such as algorithm changes and updates.
Useful SEO Tools to Track Success
We mention how important it is to set goals for yourself. Tracking your success is integral to that pursuit. Consider these wonderful tools for tracking your SEO campaign.
- Organic Search Traffic – This refers to visits a website gets from search engine results. It can be measured using Google Analytics.
- Social Shares – How many people are sharing your content on social media? This can lead to more views and visits to your website.
- Backlink volume – Backlinks come from sites that trust your content enough to link to it as a reference. Through backlinks, a website will rank higher in Google.
- Advanced Web Ranking – This tool helps you to track your site’s rank, monitor competitors, access local rankings, and create a branded SEO report.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool – Helpful in spotting onsite issues and appropriate for larger sites, this tool is easy to use and straightforward.
- Conversion Rate – Companies should determine their conversion rate from organic traffic. Without tracking conversion rates, your business can never improve.
Surviving the World of SEO
SEO makes your site perform the best it can in search engines if proper optimization strategies are employed. These valuable ideas for SEO success will increase your site’s online visibility and help you attain your pre-set goals, ensuring you’ll survive in the ever-changing SEO environment.
If you have any further questions regarding SEO best practices in today’s environment, you can read more about it on our blog, or feel free to contact us today for more information!
