by Karl Orr, founder of riseis a digital marketing agency that builds high-performing websites for some of the fastest growing brands.
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Investing in brand search engine optimization (SEO) in 2022 is more than necessary and a priority. SEO optimizes your website’s visibility by increasing your chances of ranking on the first page of search engine results. Investing in SEO makes it easier for current and potential customers to find you online and provides long-term brand equity.
What is SEO?
Google calls SEO the process of making a website better for search engines. If you’re new to the world of SEO, you’ll notice his two main categories of SEO. On-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO We focus on optimizing the controllable parts of your website, such as:
• Keyword strategy
• metadata
• High quality content creation
• Page speed optimization
Off-page SEO We focus on increasing domain authority through off-site efforts such as:
• link building
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Paid search marketing
Before we get too complicated, let’s take a look at the top 7 SEO best practices you should incorporate as part of your 2022 digital marketing strategy, no matter how big or small your budget.
1. Create content for humans first.
Creating accurate, quality content on a regular basis should remain an integral part of your digital marketing strategy. You should optimize your content for search engines with your target keywords and keyword phrases, but you don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard or stuffed with keywords.
It’s equally important that your content is readable, interesting, and provides value to your readers. Many companies create content without thinking about their target audience. If you don’t know everything there is to know about your target audience yet, find out. Use research to discover your audience’s problems and address them with your content.
2. Use multiple long-tail keyword phrases.
Search engines are becoming more aware of the relevant subtopics of a given keyword, increasing competition for short tail keywords. To supplement your basic keyword strategy, use long-tail keyword phrases of 3 or more words to rank on relevant terms. Be sure to include these long-tail keyword phrases in your content, title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs.
3. Focus on featured snippets.
Featured snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google search results and answer a searcher’s query. According to one study, featured snippets get about 8.6% of all clicks. Optimizing your content to appear in featured snippets can significantly improve your organic CTR. Optimize for long-tail keywords, use question words like ‘why’, ‘do’ and ‘can’, and format your content into paragraphs, lists or tables for easy scanning.
4. Pay attention to user experience.
Optimizing your website for user experience is key to your long-term online success. However, many abstract factors, such as the user’s emotions, motivations, and values, can influence the user experience. In digital marketing, Google’s new algorithm update uses a variety of metrics, including core web vitals, to evaluate a user’s overall experience on a web page.
You can improve the user experience of our website by examining page load speed, specifically optimizing images and videos, minimizing redirects, and enabling browser caching and cookies. Other metrics to consider include interactivity, visual stability, and HTTPS security. Take steps to improve these metrics and consider bounce rate, average time on page, and click-through rate.
5. Focus on technical SEO.
Website technical issues often result in poor user experience. My team and I review our client’s website using our technical SEO checklist.
• Google’s Core Web Vitals
• Safety
• URL structure
• Website architecture, including internal links
Technical SEO lays a strong foundation for your website to better support your digital marketing efforts.
6. Build backlinks.
Backlinks are important in building brand authority and should be the backbone of any SEO strategy. Many businesses accept the importance of having a content strategy, but it is useless if no one is linking to your content. When looking for link building opportunities, look for authoritative websites. , improve your ranking, credibility and traffic.
Good link building options include mentioning unlinked brands and websites and joining thought leadership councils. In addition to providing opportunities to network with like-minded peers, joining a community of experts becomes part of his regular SEO campaigns and link building budget. Backlinks provide great value, provide social proof, increase visibility, and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
7. Create an internal linking strategy.
Focusing on internal links helps search engines understand the meaning, hierarchy and authority of your website and each page. A good internal linking strategy includes where to link to your page, which anchor text to use, and how often you link to your page. These factors help Google understand the priority of each page when crawling and indexing it. Internal links are very important for large sites that have a lot of content and need to maximize their budget.
If you don’t currently have a team or agency dedicated to your website and digital marketing efforts, you could be missing out on hundreds of new customers. By working with a digital marketing company, you get a website and his team of SEO experts who understand the nuances of his SEO strategy to excel in today’s digital world.
