The 4 Major Pillars To An Effective SEO Strategy In Houston
If you do a quick search on “SEO ranking factors” that will provide you with numerous answers. There is so much information that is available these days. In reality, although there are probably hundreds of different variables that work together to determine final rankings a lot of information that is offered is only guesswork. And every ranking factor is definitely not relevant for every single business.
Website owners need to seriously consider the following four key pillars of SEO:
- Technical SEO: The extent to which your content is able to be crawled as well as indexed effectively.
- Content: Having the best and most relevant answers to the questions that prospects have.
- On-site SEO: Optimizing your HTML and content
- Off-site SEO: Building authority for your website to make sure the deck is stacked in your favor by Google
1. Technical SEO
Although technical SEO might appear to be daunting at first, we are simply talking about making sure that search engines are able to read the content and explore your website. A lot of this will be handled by the content management system that you use, as well as tools such as Deep Crawl and Screaming Frog that can scan your website and highlight any technical problems that it might have.
The major areas that should be considered are the following:
- Crawl: Are search engines able to explore your website?
- Index: Is it completely clear which of the pages on your site should be indexed and returned by the search engines?
- Mobile: Does your website adapt well the mobile users?
- Speed: To keep visitors happy it is critical to have fast page load times.
- Technical: Is your website using search engine friendly CMS or technology?
- Hierarchy: How is the content on your website structured?
If you have a small business website that uses WordPress, then you should be able to check technical SEO off of your list fairly quickly. However, if you have a big custom website that has millions of pages on it, then the technical SEO process is a lot more important.
A lot of what is considered to be “technical SEO” actually is part of your website’s development and design. The key here is to make sure that your developer has a good understanding of the interplay between SEO, development, and website design and how to get a mobile-optimized and very fast website built.
2. On-site SEO Optimization
You need to ensure that your website is optimized at both the individual page level and also as a whole. There is some crossover with technical SEO here, and you should start by making sure your website has a content hierarchy that is well-structured.
One you have a well-structured website, it is a fairly straightforward process to apply sensible optimization. The following are the key areas to focus on:
- Keyword research: Understanding your target audience’s language.
- Descriptive URLs: Make sure each of your URLs is descriptive and simple.
- Page title: Naturally use keywords in your page titles.
- Meta descriptions: Create meta descriptions as f they were ad copy for driving clicks to your site.
- Content optimization: Use keywords along with their variations in a sensible way in your copy.
- Good user experience (UX): Make sure your website is enjoyable to navigate and use.
- Strong calls to action: Be sure to make thing easy for your visitors so they know what action to take.
- Structured data markup: To improve your click-through rates, tap into the most recent SERP features.
When you are optimizing your website, make sure that your customers are considered. If you run a local business, then using local SEO will be the most important, and your location and address will be critical points to optimize.
3. Content
Content is the king. Isn’t that how the saying goes? In a way, it is true. Your website is actually just a wrapper to store your content in. It is your content that tells prospects what things you do, where and how you do them, who have done things for in the past, and why somebody would want to use your business. If you are savvy, then your content will go beyond those obvious elements and help prospective customers accomplish their goals.
- For businesses that provide services, there are three main categories that we will divide your content into:
- Service content. What services you provide and where you offer them.
- Credibility content. Why should a prospect do business with your company?
- Marketing content. Content to help position your company as the expert and place your business in front of your prospects at an earlier point in the buying cycle.
It is very important to understand that SEO is essential for all of these types of content, but quite often is only considered with service-type content. When it comes to case studies, testimonials, reviews and other forms of credibility content, SEO is usually forgotten.
Make sure that all your marketing content is optimized, including testimonials, portfolio entries, and case studies – and not only the obvious service pages on your website.
A solid SEO and content marketing strategy is the most scalable way for you to promote your business to a larger audience as well. It usually has the highest ROI, since there is no cost per click involved – so you can scale your marketing without scaling your costs directly. This type of SEO strategy is not the best for every business, however, it is practically unbeatable when it’s a good fit.
The following are key takeaways:
- Optimize your content across the complete customer journey.
- Decide whether content marketing is a good fit for you via organic search.
- There are still far too many SEO methods that take a paint-by-numbers approach, where local businesses pay agencies to pump blog posts out that are not a good strategic fit for them. Make sure that your content is all optimized, and make sure content marketing is a good fit for the marketing techniques you are using before doing it.
4. Off-site Authority Building
All SEO comes to the same spot eventually: authority building. To a major extent, building authority involves link building. It is true that links are a critical component still in building strong organic rankings for your website. However, links can be the most difficult part of SEO to really get right.
It is very important to make sure you have your link philosophy clarified before starting on the process. That can make or break the link-building efforts that you do. Although link building is a very deep topic that can’t be covered in depth in this article, if you get a positive link-building philosophy developed, then you will at least be ahead of most of your competitors already.
Key Takeaways:
- Be sure to build the type of real links that actually make sense out in the real world so that you don’t upset the qualitative aspects of the algorithm, as well as its punitive side.
- Make sure you have content on your website that actually deserves to be linked to and rank well.
Summary
It isn’t necessary for SEO to be really complicated. SEO has four key areas that need to be considered, and there is a methodical and structured process you can follow in order to optimize your website.
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