Google employs SEO as a gatekeeper to present the high quality search results for any given search query. For that reason, it is essential to prove to Google that your company’s webpage is the best option for your customer’s web search for products or services that your business offers. For small business owners, the internet can unfortunately be a cocktail of helpful resources and extremely confusing marketing information. Some marketers will claim that SEO is dead; whereas others will state SEO is still an essential part of a basic marketing strategy plan. 

It’s important to not over complicate your marketing plans when it comes to developing your SEO strategy. Here is some helpful information on how to optimize your SEO tactics in 2020:

Defining SEO:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. (Source) The reason why SEO is beneficial is because it helps small business owners create fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank higher in search engines, which in turn helps bring more qualified potential customers to their sites and eventually increases conversion rates. (Source)

Many people are unaware that there are three different types of SEO or that some forms of SEO are more beneficial for different industries than others. Not every business can optimize their webpage for search the same way, and therefore not every SEO will have the same optimization process or results. It’s a strategist’s job to examine his or her industry, find out what’s important to their audience, and develop an SEO plan that puts the right content in front of their ideal target audience.

To get a better understanding of what type of SEO should be optimized for your website, let’s review the following three types of SEO:

• On-page SEO: This SEO focuses on the content that’s “on the page,” and how to optimize that content to help boost the website’s ranking for specific keywords.
• Off-page SEO: This SEO focuses on the links that are directing to the website from elsewhere on the internet. The number of “backlinks,” and the publishers carrying those links, that link to your website help you build trust in the eyes of a search engine. This causes your website to rank higher as a result.
• Technical SEO: This SEO focuses on a website’s architecture, examining the backend of that website to see how each webpage is “technically” set up. Google cares as much about the code of a website as it does its content, making this speciality quite important to a website’s search engine ranking.

With this in mind, today we will take a closer look as to how to improve your on-page SEO:

3 Tips for Improving Your On-page SEO:

Make a list of topics.

Keywords will always be the heart of SEO, however they’re not your first step to an organic growth strategy. Your first step to create good SEO will always be finding efficient topics relevant to your audience.

Organic traffic is one of the most important goals for content creators, therefore you should keep SEO in mind when creating a piece of content. A topic with excellent SEO potential has high volume and low difficulty, as it’s popular among your audience and is not very competitive.

The steps to making a list of topics is simple:

• Create a list of 10 short words or phrases associated with your product or service. You can use SEO tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs. Utilize these tools to identify a topic’s search volume and similar variations of it that are suitable for your business.
• Utilize search volume and competition as your measure in order to narrow down your list to 10-15 short-tail keywords that would be valuable to your audience.
• Rank that list in the order of priority based on its monthly search volume and relevance to your business.

Create blog content and resources surrounding these topics.

Many small business owners will start a blog in hopes that it will help grow their business without fully understanding the “why” as to why blogging actually is so beneficial. Blogging offers a great platform not only to prove a company’s expertise in their industry, but also to improve their search engine optimization, or SEO—and almost without even trying. (Source)

Additionally, blogging is a fantastic way to rank for keywords and topic lists because new posts are essentially a new web page that gives you another chance to rank in search engines. When you optimize your blog posts for SEO reasons, it is important to apply this following tip:

• Don’t include your long-tail keyword more than 3-4x throughout the page because Google doesn’t consider exact keyword matches as often as it used to. Too many instances of your keyword can result in your web page being penalized since you’re “keyword stuffing.” 

Highlight embedded reviews that cover these topics.

In our 3 Ways to Transform Your Local SEO blog post, we mentioned that Google keeps an eye out for when deciding where to rank pages in its search queries. The top item on that list is of course high-quality content. Customer reviews are one of the most relevant snippets of content you have about your business since they are messages sent from local community members with no hidden agenda. 

Creating a dedicated landing page that features embedded reviews that highlights keywords and helpful topics for your customers benefits your SEO greatly. Our customer CPR Cell Phone Repair utilized this tactic as a part of their on-page SEO strategy and profited greatly from it. The result of CPR Cell Phone Repair utilizing this strategy was a 700% increase in network reviews with relevant keywords & topics.

Although it can be daunting at first, you should view SEO as the opportunity to let your service or product shine in comparison to your competitors. Following these simple tactics to improve your on-page SEO can result in high yielding rewards like it did for our customer, CPR Cell Phone Repair. Although you may have great reviews and an impeccable track record, if your product or service never reaches the top of that search list, you may not see the growth you desire. But, if you optimize your on-page SEO, you will give your prospective clients a better opportunity to find you.

Lee McNiel