In our last blog we went through five ways to improve your SEO results while also improving your website and the user experience at the same time. Thanks to continuous improvements in Google’s algorithm, nothing is more important than good content and smart website design. Your site’s search performance is dependent on its overall quality, and when everything works in concert together.
We’ve already gone through the need for high-quality content development, how site security is essential, how informative meta descriptions work and natural keywords work in your favour and why a good user experience should always be the goal.
Coming up are five more ways to keep driving up your results while also tending to your user’s needs and wants. HubSpot has provided this downloadable report titled 20 SEO Myths You Should Leave Behind in 2018, which used for some of the points in this article.
6. Create a Google+ Page
Google is getting way better at determining where businesses are located, and therefore the areas websites would like to target to attract their customers. The Google Penguin update in 2014 takes hundreds of indicators into consideration and is quite effective at figuring out where you are and who you would like to talk to. As business owners, we all know that it’s way easier to provide services to people in close proximity rather than thousands of miles away.
At Emphasize, we like face-to-face meetings so we can really get to know the people we are working with. That’s why we have a Google+ page. This is an effective way to really make sure Google knows where you can be found in real life. It’s imperative that businesses create a Google+ page and tha you pay as much attention to it as you do your regular website.
7. Optimize Your Images
Images provide a lot of value to a website. They create context, they provide the reader a visual break and they just plain look nice. But the sad thing is, images can’t be seen by search engines. Describe your images to your preferred search engine by filling in as much alt-text as you can. Use a relevant name for the image in the alt-text and as a file name, and if you can, even give it a title and captions directly on the page.
8. Write for Question-Based Search Queries
Question-based queries are becoming the norm, and Google is great at answering them. It will present what it calls a “featured snippet” on the first page of search results, which is a website where it found the exact answer to your question. Try to anticipate a problem your customer is trying to solve. Then use a subhead to pose the question they are asking. Present your answer using bullets and short simple writing, and you have just increased your chances of landing in the “featured snippet” box, which is prime real estate on results pages.
9. Responsiveness More Important Than Ever
More people now own cellphones with data than ever before, and there are dozens of different types of tablets available on the market now, too. Add them all up and there are countless different sizes of screens people are looking at your website on. Responsive websites are more important than ever, not only to make sure people get an attractive version of your website no matter what device they found you on, but also because of a Google algorithm update in 2015 called Mobilegeddon, which also now uses responsiveness as an important ranking signal.
10. Change Your Domain Name if it’s Not Working
A horrible web design mistake used to be changing your domain name after Google had found and indexed your pages. You would immediately fall completely off the search radar, and it would take months – even years – to build up search rankings again as Google slowly started to recognize your site again. Thankfully, this is no longer true. If you have changed your business name, or your old domain name doesn’t represent what you do anymore, or if it is simply outdated, go ahead and change it. There could still be a lag in your results, but it won’t be months. A quick work-around is to purchase the domain name of your choice and to put up an interim site for a couple months until you are ready to switch over completely.
Emphasize Web Design in Calgary
Our goal is to help small businesses succeed in Calgary, and SEO is just one of the services we offer. We specialize in Attracting, Converting and Closing qualified online leads with inbound marketing methods that work.
