The goal of most website operators is to rank first in Google. In order to reach this, website owners try all sorts of things. But without a proper strategy, which is behind the optimization attempts, the measures are mostly successful only in the short term. In order to know which points to consider when developing your SEO strategy as efficient as possible and which SEO optimization tips you should follow we put together a detailed outline below:
SEO Strategy: Your Main Goals
The one-size-fits-all SEO strategy that can apply to all websites does not exist. The strategy should be adapted to your individual wishes and the goals of your website – no matter if short, medium or long term.
- Is the goal of your website to sell products or inform users?
- Which keywords are really relevant to you?
- Which personas are in your target group that you want to tap into?
These are important points that must appear in your strategy. Make sure that your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attractive, realistic & timed) and are backed by KPIs.
SEO Strategy: Your Current Status
Before you start thinking about how your strategy should look like and what goals your want to achieved you should evaluate your status quo. It is very important to first take a close look at where your page is currently and what points you can improve on. The status quo gives you important insights and many potentials for optimization, which can be very effective even with little effort. In addition, you get a sound foundation on which to align your goals. Also, you can go through our SEO checklist to give a brief overview of your site in terms of its main SEO elements.
Another possibility for you and your site is to look around at the competition. Examine other websites that rank well in your industry and find out what they are doing. You can also carry out an SEO audit, in which you thoroughly examine your entire page in order to find the appropriate potential for search engine optimization here as well. There are several tools out there such as SEMrush, ahrefs or MOZ that can assist you in conducting a thorough analysis of both your own website and that of your competitors.
From Status Quo to Strategy
You have gained insights from the checks and analysis and are ready to go ahead with your SEO optimization? Good, then you should have found, apart from getting a good overview of the performance and the state of your website, different points and areas that need optimization. You should include this in your SEO strategy, so that these potentials are used. Depending on the impact of the points, they naturally play a different role for your SEO strategy. In addition, and this is something very crucial to for your SEO optimization efforts, make sure that your website is running on a good server! This is the basis for any SEO optimization to work as this sets the framework for your online success.
So what is the perfect SEO strategy?
As already mentioned above, there is no one single solution or formula SEO strategy that applies to all websites. But to give you an good overview we will show you a few SEO optimization tips below which you should consider in your SEO strategy.
1. On-Site SEO Optimization
The on-site seo optimization is primarily about optimizing the content and on-page elements of your site. Fundamentally important for this are your keywords.
But before you do the content optimization, you should find out the keywords that are really relevant to you. For which keywords do you want to be found and what are your potential customers looking for? Basically, after your research you should have keywords that explain your page and with which you are already familiar. If you are aware of which keywords are the right ones for you and have them assigned to the appropriate pages, we recommend that you follow these three SEO optimization tips:
Optimizing the Title and Descriptions
Little effort but high impact! Through changes in the snippets and descriptions, success is usually achieved in the short term, as these are a ranking criterion for Google. Try to pinpoint the user intent and highlight your benefits. The optimization is most worthwhile, for example, if your site is already scratching the top 10 ranking. Through small adjustments, you can reach top positions in search engines with optimized descriptions.
If you have not generally focused on optimizing snippets, you should definitely consider this as an important point. Make sure that you optimize your snippet on the focus keyword of the corresponding page. Also ensure that no other pages for this keyword rank so that the website does not block itself.
Create High-Quality Content
“Content is King” – this statement is often referred to the relevance and importance of content marketing. High-quality texts and content are fundamentally important for the success of websites, because this is what makes good rankings and visibility possible. Make sure your content is high quality and cover the need and intent of the user!
Of course, in the beginning it’s always easiest to start where content already exists. Just try to optimize it based on the potential you have found in your research. Hints that you realize that your content is not enough, for example, can be bad user signals, such as low interaction with your page or high bounce rates. Critically question the content from the point of view of your users who are not as well versed and find their way as you as the person in charge of the site.
So make sure that you really have all the necessary content available to the user. Incomplete pages or missing information scare the user. Ask yourself the question of whether your content is already tailored to the search intention of the users. Ultimately, you write the content for your users and not for yourself or Google.
When optimizing you should focus on the core content and topics of your site. If these have already been optimized, you can deal with the subtopics. As with the headlines, we recommend you to keep the focus of the content around your keywords so that no similar content can be found on multiple pages.
Clear Title Structure
In order for users to find their way around easier, it is helpful that you do not large blocks of textd but rather short & clear text sections with meaningful headings. The benefits that you get from it is the the easier reading flow for users. Also, it makes it easier for search engine bots to rate your site correctly. We always recommend referring to questions that the user asks about a specific topic and structure it accordingly. Starting with the most important question sorted by decreasing relevance. You can achieve this by creating a hierarchical heading structure starting from H1 then H2, H3 etc.
2. Technical SEO Optimization
In addition to optimization your content for SEO the technical optimization is another point where improvements often lead to positive results. In addition to the loading time and mobile optimization, the site-structure plays a major role.
Mobile First
The impact on rankings by technical optimizations are enormous in the today’s time. That’s why you should not ignore this point in your SEO strategy. The most important point that we can recommend to you are the optimizations for the mobile presentation of your website. Google is now focusing on mobile first and is starting to disregard pages which are not fully optimized for mobile. To optimize your page on mobile devices your design and content should be adjusted accordingly.
Loading Time / Page Speed
For some time now the load time of a page is a ranking criteria for Google. If you have determined in your analysis that your page is much slower compared to the competition, you should take appropriate measures. Above all, make sure that images on your site are small and optimized for fast loading as these account for a large part of the loading timeand call the need of a cache. You can get help with various tools (such as PageSpeed Insights from Google or WebPageTest) and different plugins (such as Smush).
Site Structure
In order to be able to index your page search engine bot have to crawl your page. To avoid any complications you should make sure to have a clear structure. This is achieved by structured directories, which, combined with a good internal linking, facilitate crawling. You should refrain from creating unnecessary pages in your SEO strategy or to have too many sub-directories. Question each page and content critically before adding a new page and make sure it really makes sense to add and classify it. With crawlers like Ryte or Screaming Frog you can get a good overview of how your page is currently structured, whether pages are currently not accessible by links and how clear your website actually is.
3. Off-Site SEO Optimization
Apart from optimizing your on-site elements and content of your website and also your technical optimization measures there is another, 3rd element which you should consider during your SEO optimization. This is called Off-site SEO which basically describes all activities that you perform outside of your website (off-site) in order to position your website better in search engines. There are several factors but we put together the two most important ones below:
Link-Building
The goal of link-building is to get high quality and high-authoritative websites to link to yours. This tells search engines that your page and content is of value and positions it better. So the better the website are that you get linked to, the better and more value that value or ‘juice’ is. You can acquire links through classic public relations measures and contact website owners to feature your articles, posts or products and get a link back to your site.
Social Media
Social media provides your website and your business another way to generate more brand awareness and visibility. These social ‘signals’ that you received through various platform help to boost your SEO as well. These are usually measured by interactions on your site through social media through likes, shares or reviews. These are then notices by search engine algorithms and help contribute positive SEO power to your website. So make sure you have active social media accounts and engage with your audience!
Summary
As you can see there are various different SEO optimization tips to follow in order to get your website ranking in search engines. As already mentioned before there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The focus should not lie on solely these above mentioned tips but you should rather use these as a guidance as they are crucial and act as a basis for any good SEO strategy.
You should also remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and does not bring short-term success. Compare it with a marathon rather than a sprint. Yet, the long-term outcome will definitely outweigh any short-term success. Especially with highly competitive keywords it can take a wile and continuous efforts to position your website high on search engines.
SEO strategies also have to be adjusted regularly as the landscape changes quickly and Google permanently develops its algorithm. So make sure to be ahead of the game and get in touch with us to develop a customized SEO strategy for your specific needs.
