In 2021, you may feel like building an SEO strategy is a waste of time. After all, don’t businesses just drive traffic to their site through social media these days? While it’s true social media is the forerunner of digital marketing efforts, SEO is still relevant and important in business. If you’re in e-commerce, search engine optimization is what gets more customers seeing your products without you having to spend hours coming up with catchy advertising material. Any local business that doesn’t use an SEO strategy to get ahead is missing out on the chance to draw in dozens of clients a month. If you’re not sure how to go about boosting your SEO strategy in this day and age, fear not. This post has five techniques that are still highly effective in our digitally-driven world.
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Boost Your Natural Keyword Integration
Keywords will always be the bread and butter of SEO. They define your entire strategy and serve as the connection between your business and future customers. But placement and phrasing are crucial. SEO is not about picking a handful of words and throwing them on your site. They should be naturally integrated into your web copy. Think about your seed words, which are the one or two-word heavy hitters you’ll focus on and their variations. Don’t forget long-tail keywords either. If you’re looking for help pinpointing the most effective keywords, an SEO consultant is a great person to invest in. You can read to find out what an SEO consultant does and how they can help utilize internal linking and other strategies to optimize your site.
Make the Most of User Experience
UX design is not web design. The entire user experience can be broken down into five elements:
- Usability
- Desirability
- Credibility
- Functionality
- Value
These components play a major role in how your site looks and feels to a viewer, and it affects your SEO more than you may realize. Modern search engine algorithms take UX into account when they’re ranking a site, so giving yours some much-needed love can do wonders for your business.
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Aim for Featured Snippets
Not everyone will score the coveted feature snippet on Google, but you should restructure all your content to be suitable for it. We’re talking old blog posts, web pages and service pages that answer a question or give instructions in a straightforward manner. Be succinct, focus on structure and optimize everything for visibility and ease of use.
Do Some Back-end Site Cleaning
Outdated plugins, broken code and large image files can slow your site down. Response time still largely impacts your rank, and technical components are just as relevant in SEO as keywords. Hire a developer or ask yours to go through your site’s code and polish its framework. You may even consider switching to a faster host who delivers a stronger performance for your viewers.
Update Old Content
You should edit and clean up posts at least once a year to make sure they are still considered relevant by Google’s standards. You also have to consider the fact that information may have changed. The last thing you want is for someone to land on a page and realize that what you’ve written is incorrect. Extending and refreshing old content can boost your traffic and drive more visitors for free.
