Search engines function by responding to a user's search query by delivering the top results based on relevancy.
Here are 5 SEO steps you can do on your own to make your website is highly visible on popular search engines - Google, Bing, and Yahoo - and even on local search apps.
Site Audit
Use Website Links: Internal and External Linking
How healthy is your site? This may sound ridiculous, but there is such a thing as site health in terms of Search Engine Optimisation.
Like a doctor’s diagnosis, a site audit can tell you what parts of your site are not working up to standard and what you can do about it to improve your site stats. Your website’s structure will be evaluated and see if it has good parameters of Technical SEO in place. The keywords used plus the meta description and title tags will be spot check for consistency. Linking errors, missing tags, and quality of inbound links, plus duplicated content will be checked during a site crawl. Also, your page loading and site speed will be measured. All these elements can affect your site rankings, with a site audit, you can optimise all of these things after you receive a detailed site audit report.
The Rise of Shareable Content: Videos and Social Media Posts
The SEO we know today is an entirely different animal from when it first started. Now, most of SEO comes from social media efforts through video channels like Youtube, Instagram, and social spitfires like Facebook.
High value, information-rich shareable content is often the key to dominating social feeds. Showing up on social very often is as good as showing up on the top search, you get high traffic plus good quality backlinks for your website. Content like videos, infographics, banners, gifs, memes, these shareable content have life cycles of their own if they’re popular enough they won’t quickly die down. It can rake in constant traffic throughout the year, and even open up audiences in untapped markets.
The SEO strategy for such shareable content is to keep producing new ones, boosting the reach of previously successful ones followed by regularly social postings at hours where the target audience is receptive to reading about your niche.
Fit for Mobile
An Eye for Local Search
Hyperlocal search is the new best friend of regional upstarts and solopreneurs. Those starting a small business whether it’s a pop-up shop, a farmer’s market, an artisan store or neighborhood service would benefit greatly by setting their sights on the homegrown territory.
Focus your SEO efforts to geo-target the consumers closer to your actual brick-and-mortar location. Particularly, those people doing “near me” search queries on their smartphones.
So if you’re from Whangarei and you have a local business selling products or services, use SEO keywords to target the community of Whangarei and Northland. In your content, feel free to mention places, people, and things that are just unique to Whangarei. By geo-targeting the local lingo and buzzwords, this will drive up your hyperlocal search as well.
Another thing, you’ll want to get your website’s information added to the local business listings, area apps, product review sites, digital newspapers of the region, Google maps, and Google My Business.
