A website is only as successful as its SEO strategy. While having a beautiful website design might look great, it doesn’t serve your business if no one can find your company online.

SEO is more strategic than one business owner can manage. It’s important to go to the professionals and consider outsourcing a company for your Long Island web design needs.

If you’re looking to take on the challenge yourself, here are 9 SEO tips to optimize your site and start growing traction.

Create Authoritative Content

Content on your website should always be informative for your audience. Google’s ranking system is going to focus on three key elements which are called E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

The search engine looks for the quality content they feel users will find useful which comes from a credible source. To build authority, start focusing on writing content on your blog and landing pages that provide detailed information such as a guide or top ten lists.

Perform Keyword Research

Keywords are essential to boost your SEO strategy. These are words and phrases your audience is searching for online. This can easily be done through various platforms such as Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, or Moz Keyword Explorer.

More advanced companies use a paid service to have more detailed information. This allows you to see how much competition is out there for the keywords and phrases you want to rank for.

Consider Keyword Placement

Where and how you place your keywords is equally as important as generating them. Remember how we said it’s important to create quality content? This also means it needs to sound natural.

Utilize headings, titles, and URLs for your keywords. However, stuffing your content with the same three words over and over again looks like spam rather than conversational. Quality over quantity is the name of the SEO game.

Create Shareable Content

Backlinks are incredibly important to keep up with the competition mentioned in the keyword research. YoastSEO, a free plugin used in WordPress accounts, allows you to see how many backlinks happen to and from your content.

The more backlinks you have, the higher your content will rank in the search engines. Think about topics other companies will want to use for backlinks.

Answer FAQs

It’s easy to get stumped when generating new website content. Thankfully, you have a wealth of knowledge ready to be untapped. Think about the frequently asked questions you receive from your customers.

This is where you come in. These are the topics they’ll be searching for online so providing them with more detailed answers is a great way to send them to your website.

Look for the Content Gaps

While planning out your content strategy, you have to look at what your competition is doing. Look for gaps in your online searches where you can fill the holes.

If there’s a topic that isn’t being covered, this is your opportunity to elaborate on it. Plus, it means there’s less competition in the search engines giving your content a better chance at a higher ranking.

Update Your Content Consistently

Creating new content on a regular schedule can seem like a lot, but consistency is key. Build out a calendar for your content strategy. Don’t worry about writing overly lengthy articles.

You can be concise with your message while linking to other posts on your site to elaborate on more detailed information.

Don’t Forget Your Alt Tags

Alt tags, also known as alternative text descriptions, are how you describe your images and video content on your website.

This is important for website visitors who may use text-only browsers. Alt tags are also essential to give search engines the ability to locate your page.

Your Metadata Needs Attention

Metadata is the part of your content that provides information about the content of your page. This includes your title, subheadings, and page descriptions.

While there is metadata for keywords as well, it’s not as commonly used for your SEO rankings.

Summary

There are ample ways to add value for your users while generating new content for the search engines. SEO should always be one of the top priorities in your content strategy.

Make sure you’re doing your research. When in doubt, turn to the professionals. It’s better to spend time creating effective content than wasting time.