You’ve created a stellar website that correctly represents your brand and your business offerings to online customers. Now all that’s left is to make sure people click on your website. And to make sure that happens, your website has to appear on the top results pages of search engines like Google and Bing. But to achieve those top spots, your business needs to have a solid SEO strategy.
Having and maintaining a good SEO strategy is the difference between your website ranked high up in the search engine result pages and the reduced chances of getting even a single click on your website. If you have spent a lot of time on your SEO efforts, not seeing the desired results can definitely be quite demotivating and frustrating.
But have you ever wondered why other websites seem to outrank you even if your site and content meet all the stipulated requirements? The reason is that your competitors are trying to bend themselves back when it comes to perfecting their SEO efforts.
With so many different websites offering similar services and products, there is no guarantee that your site will rank first on SERPs. Even if you have spent months building up your company’s SEO, here are a few tips and tricks that can help boost your SEO within a matter of hours. These simple ways can be implemented within an hour and can improve Your website’s SEO.
5 tips to help you improve your website’s SEO in an hour
- Optimize the page speed of you mobile site
- Polish your local SEO
- Utilize the anchor text to its fullest
- Choose the right URL for your website
- Borrow and incorporate your competitor’s keywords
Optimize the page speed of your mobile site
With the digital world proudly and happily accepting Google’s mobile-first index update, the world seems to be slowly moving towards a mobile-first consumer marketplace. As cellular technology takes leaps and bounds with 5G and lightning-fast speeds for consumers, the time has come for businesses to optimize themselves with the fast-moving trend of cell phones.
While multiple brands are still lagging behind with regards to optimizing their business for the cellular audience, optimizing your site for mobile would be a great way to stay ahead of the competition and make your presence felt in the online world.
A mobile website that takes forever to load tends to have a negative impact on your website’s performance because it tells search engines like Google that your site is too slow, which is a legit ranking factor on the search engine. With more than half of Google’s search volume coming from mobile sites, it is in every businesses best interest to ensure that their website loads as fast as possible and doesn’t keep the user waiting long enough for them to jump on a different page altogether.
Another reason that your website may lag behind is that the images used on the page haven’t been optimized for a mobile site. When your content is image-heavy, or if you use too many high-quality images, it automatically increases your page loading time, threatening users to leave your site and make the switch to a competitor.
Polish Your Local SEO
While optimizing your website for a global audience makes perfect sense, make sure that you do not ignore any aspect of local SEO for your site. According to various studies, more than half of the consumers who conduct a local search on their phone might just end up visiting the store after all.
Therefore, if your brand is not taking advantage of that and ranking for keywords in your local geographical location, your business could be on the verge of losing out to competitors. Improving your website’s overall SEO may be time-consuming, but you can get local SEO success with just a few simple tips.
To make sure you rank high for local listings, insert your local keywords into unique descriptions across multiple listings. You can also try and ensure that the photographs used in the web content are current. Also, remember to include your business category while putting out the local listing.
One of the simplest ways of making sure your local SEO is on point is by claiming your Google My Business profile. It’ll surely do wonders for improving your website’s SEO in a matter of minutes. A Google My Business listing allows vendors to show up for local searches better, so they need to have a physical location and street address to claim one.
Utilize The Anchor Text To Its Fullest
The first thing that goes into your website even before you start optimizing your site is writing content for it. Your content must be of utmost priority because most online users will stop engaging with your website if the content or the layout is entirely unattractive or even slightly off-putting.
Therefore, as you pen down the content for your website, consider all the places where you can smartly utilize the anchor text. What’s anchor text, you ask? Well, it is described as the clickable text that floats on top of a hyperlink when your mask hovers over it. This link takes the user directly to another web page, either within your site or on the internet.
A business can improve the condition of its website’s SEO within the hour if they use effective anchor text to help users navigate their site better and find whatever it is that they’re looking for. Remember, while writing that your content should include ample keywords and phrases related to the brand and the business.
Using anchor text is a great way to improve your site’s SEO. However, as a business owner, keep in mind that using too many keywords that don’t benefit your readers, or excessive linking can raise red flags for Google and get you blacklisted from the search engine altogether.
Choose the right URL for your website
Even before you make your website go live on the internet, the first thing you need to do is give it a name. Also identified as your site’s domain name, it cannot be just any willy-nilly name. This is the address that your online visitors will type in to get to you. Therefore, it’s a giant sign that announces your business to your potential customers, making it quite a big deal.
Because of its importance, your domain name is also the first place for major search engines like Google to understand your website, your business, the products or services you offer, etc. and, therefore, decide how to rank it on the result pages of applicable keywords.
Keeping this in mind, online companies need to make sure that all their pages and URLs are squeaky clean. This means there would be zero tolerance for special characters, page IDs, and hashtags.
An ideal domain is supposed to include your business name, with perhaps a keyword or two that bear relevance to your business offerings. For example, if you’re running a construction company called Bob’s Construction, your site could be called www.bobsconstruction.com or something similar.
Borrow and incorporate your competitor’s keywords
It was in its 2008 algorithm update that Google lifted the blanket ban on bidding on your competitor’s keywords, allowing business owners to bid against competitor brands as long as they refrained from using their trademarked name in the ad copy.
But why is this step necessary? Well, bidding against your competitor’s keywords allows your business and brand to generate targeted traffic, i.e., it’ll help drive customers to your site who are explicitly looking for a product or service your brand and your competition offer.
Many studies have proved that branded keyword phrases are way more likely to end in visitor conversions and leads, making customer retention all the easier and more simple. An excellent way to go about it is to use your competitor’s weaknesses to fuel your ad copy and make it eye-catching enough for potential customers to find you.
Here’s a tiny checklist you can use for selecting the right keywords to borrow from your competitors:
- Pick the easiest keywords first as they are easy to create content for
- Choose keywords that are similar to your own so that you can modify them easily and confirm their conversion rate
- Pick keywords that are high volume and low difficulty with a high organic click-through rate
Final Thoughts
Although it’s 2024 and everyone is aware of the importance of online marketing and SEO, a lot of business owners simply fail to see the error of their ways and keep wondering what they are doing wrong with regards to their website.
However, as we can learn from the small tips mentioned above, with a few easy and simple adjustments, companies can make a lot of headway in getting the desired traffic through organic search results.
Remember, as a business owner, you must consider search engine giants like Google and their traffic as the holy grail of any internet-related business. So if you want to have an active online presence on Google, you have to play by its rules. But regardless of whether you’re at the top or bottom of your game, there’s always room for improvement.
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Vidisha Joshi, a former entertainment journalist for a US-based publication, has previously dabbled in different aspects of writing like sports, lifestyle, as well as technology, before taking up specialization in guest posts service with Stan Ventures. A journalism major, she got into writing right after her graduation.
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