Today we want to peel back the curtain when it comes to SEO and answer some questions like, what is SEO, why don’t I rank for certain keywords and how do I increase organic traffic to my site. So let’s dive in.
What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is different than SEM, which is Search Engine Marketing or what we often refer to as paid search. Our concern is mostly with your organic traffic. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t pay attention to the other channels and traffic coming to your site because a lot of times we can piggyback off those efforts to drive more traffic.
So what does it mean to optimize for the search engines? The example I’ll go through today are the few steps we take to optimize a landing page.
Landing Page Optimization
- The first step we do when creating any type of content is keyword research. The keywords that people are using to find your site are tracked. We use tools like Google Search Console, Google Adwords, MOZ and Aherfs to find the high volume search terms to include in our content.
- No keyword is measured exactly the same. Thousands of people may search for car dealership near me, but less people are going to be searching for a used 2016 blue Dodge pick up truck. So we are looking for high volume search terms to bring the most visitors to your site.
- We first add the meta titles and descriptions to the page. If you’re not familiar with meta titles and descriptions you’re not alone. I guarantee that you’ve seen them before. It’s the title and snippet of information that you see in search results.
- Google doesn’t use meta data as a ranking factor, but meta information is extremely important because users read them and determine if the result is what they are looking for. They have a huge impact on click through rate.
- The next on page optimization we add is the H1 tag. You can think of the H1 tag as the title of the page, this is also a rich source of information for search engines so we want to make sure that we have keywords listed there as well.
- The last thing we add is schema markup. For more information on schema markup, check out our previous blog post on schema.
Let us optimize your website
After the site is technically sound, we submit the page for indexing. With a combined effort from social media and paid search the page will start to rank organically.
If you’d like to get more detail on optimizing a landing page or have any further questions please feel free to reach out to us directly.