Spring cleaning your website: 5 SEO best practices
Happy spring! As we spring forward in time it might be time to take a quick pause and take a closer look at your SEO strategy and content optimization efforts.
While there are other marketing tactics you can use to drive traffic to your website, like email, social media, and paid advertising, you simply cannot beat or ignore organic traffic! Not only is organic traffic free, which improves the ROI on those visitors’ conversions, but optimizing your site for organic traffic is a key component of long-term success for your website.
We all know the basics like keyword optimization and building backlinks, but let’s look at some SEO strategies that often get overlooked or could really make a difference to your SEO results this summer.
5 website optimization tactics for SEO
1. Identify intent
Search intent or user intent is the purpose behind a search query. Most searches fall into these categories:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
Informational searches could be like, How to make chocolate chip cookies, how old is Paul Rudd, what are bluelight glasses? These searchers are looking for education, how-tos, or answers to specific questions.
Navigational searches are for specific websites or brands, like: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, or Marketo login. These people know what they’re looking for, they just don’t go directly to the source.
Transactional intent means the customer is looking to buy, book, or convert. They may be searching for flights, hotels, tours, retail items, clothing, etc.
By understanding a searcher’s intent you can create stronger content. If you know a customer is performing a transactional search, you can limit the content on a product page to help a customer make their purchase faster. But, if you know that customer is at the beginning of their buying journey, you can provide blog posts, checklists, videos, or other content to educate them about what they’re looking for.
2. Capture interest with a clickable title tag and meta description
Pretend it’s the 1930s and you’ve newspapers to sell. You need the newspaper seller shouting out headlines and quick descriptions that compels people to want to learn more and buy, which in today’s world means click.
Take the time to craft clickable title tags, the hyperlinked headlines that show up in search results, and make sure your title tag tells the searcher if your content is relevant to their search.
Best practices for title tags:
- Keep it under 60 characters
- Include your primary keyword term – and don’t keyword stuff
- Be clear about the search intent your content matches
- Make it engaging and to the point
Your meta description is a quick summary of your page’s content and should be optimized with keywords, which will be bolded if they match the searcher’s query. Meta descriptions should be around 155-160 characters.
Best practices for meta descriptions:
- They should be unique for each page of your site – no mass copying and pasting!
- They need to show an accurate summary of your page’s content
- They should include keywords
- They should have action-oriented copy, like: read more, book now, learn more, etc.
3. Add internal links
I think this idea gets overlooked unintentionally, especially by brands with smaller marketing teams who don’t have time to check for related content or can’t remember all the related content they’ve created. But, internal linking is an important SEO tactic as it helps Google understand your site and how your content relates to each other.
Google and other search engines use internal links to make connections between the pages of your site and learn more about your site’s content. They send out crawlers to follow links and the more internal links you send that crawler on, the more information the crawler can collect and index for your site.
Obviously you’ll have internal links on your homepage point to subpages of your site, but make sure you’re adding internal links to blog posts, webinar registration pages, and pillar pages. Each page of your site should be pointing to at least one other related page or back to the homepage.
4. Keep UX top of mind
Google isn’t just helping searchers find and get to your site – they’re also tracking what people do once they’re there. The user experience (UX) of your site is very important in determining your ranking. You could have amazing title tags and meta descriptions that get tons of clicks, but if the user is having a terrible experience and leaves right away, that tells Google that your site and its content has some problems.
Tips to improve UX for SEO:
- Have a clear, consistent navigation
- Have easily visible CTA buttons
- Use subheadings with keywords
- Create visually appealing content
- But don’t overload a visitor with visuals and text by leaving white space
- Stop using intrusive popups on every page, use them sparingly or use exit-intent popups
5. Keyword stuff – correctly!
Yes, you want to avoid keyword stuffing your content as no one, absolutely no one wants to read content like:
“Looking for quality house cleaners in Denver for spring cleaning? We guarantee we’ll meet and exceed all of your needs for spring cleaning in Denver! Our Denver house cleaners are passionate about organizing, sanitizing, and keeping your home in tip-top shape. Let us take care of spring cleaning with our expert house cleaners, all locally based in Denver. We look forward to taking care of your spring cleaning needs with our team of professional Denver house cleaners.”
But, you can use your keywords a bit more strategically by optimizing your URLs! Always include a keyword in your URL and remove unnecessary stop words for an optimized and clean URL.
You should also include breadcrumbs at the top of your page to show off your site’s structure and content hierarchy, as well as make it easy for people to navigate backwards and visit the page they want to go to next.
If you could only make one SEO optimization this spring, what would it be? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
