Improve Your SEO With These Do’s and Don’ts
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which helps search engines like Google or Yahoo to rank your website in search results.
Good SEO improves your rankability and helps your website to appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
You want your website to rank higher so that customers are finding your page when making relevant searches.
Better SEO = higher traffic rates and higher conversion rates.
SEO Do’s and Don’ts
Improve your SEO by following these Do’s and Don’ts!
Do Keyword Research
Keywords are the specific words and phrases that people type into search engines to find what they are looking for. Keywords also tell Google and other search engines what your content is about, so that it can show your content to people who are searching for it. You want to use keywords in your website copy to attract the right audience to your content and to rank higher in search results.
Your selected keywords should:
Be relevant for your business so that it attracts the right audience
Have decent traffic, usually anything above 100 searches/month is a good starting point
Have low competition, meaning others are not using a lot of the same keywords
Do Write For Your Audience
Yes, good SEO must consider how search engines are reading and accessing your content (this is crawlability), but not at the expense of readability or audience understanding. Write for your audience first and foremost. Provide the content that they are looking for, that will help them understand if your business is right for them. And then optimize that content for search engines.
Do Optimize Your Site to be Mobile-Friendly
Having a mobile-friendly website is a must. This is a mobile-first world, making it vitally important to consider how your website will look and perform not only on desktop but also on other devices in the early stages of website design.
A mobile-friendly website ensures a positive user experience - which can lead to an increase in sales, repeat customers, and brand loyalty!
Don’t Keyword Stuff
Keyword stuffing is when you intentionally “stuff” your copy full of the same keywords over and over. We’ve all seen this tactic used on those websites where the city and/ or services are listed a ridiculous and unnatural number of times. This is not an effective strategy and can actually result in your content getting blocked by search engines. Alternatively, your keywords should occupy about 1-2% of your written copy and should be spread out in different locations throughout your text as well as in your page title, subheadings, and meta description.
Don’t Use irrelevant and Unnatural Phrasing
As mentioned above, it is vital to write for your audience and not for search engines. Avoid keyword stuffing or using words that have no context or relevance to your page. If you rank higher in the search engine results page (SERP), but your audience still isn’t converting, there might be a problem with your copy. Good copy plays an important role in improving user experience and gaining trust from your audience.
Don’t Use Large Image Files
The larger the image file, the longer it takes to load. This creates a poor user experience when visiting your site. Most people expect a site to load within two seconds. If your site surpasses that three seconds mark, they are likely to abandon your site. We live in a day and age where there is a surplus of content available online. If your site doesn’t optimally perform, the visitor can easily move on to the next site in the search results to find what they are looking for, quicker. A simple strategy to improve your site’s SEO is to optimize your images by reducing their large file sizes.
SEO can work for all businesses — it might not work in the same way, and it might not have the same results, but there’s a strategy that can work for your business. Here at Media Shop Collective, we offer a variety of SEO package options to optimize your site. Contact us to learn more about how we use SEO to help increase your site traffic, usability and improve your conversions!