How thoughtful SEO helps your business
If you have marketed your business online for any length of time, you know that search rankings and SEO matter. You want to rank as high in search results as possible in order to attract more customers to your site.
You also know that the “rules” (in quotes because there are no hard-and-fast rules) of SEO change fairly regularly. Google and other leading search engines update their algorithms often in order to help deliver the highest-quality results to their users.
So, what makes your page a “high-quality result”? Here are just a few ways to improve your search rankings:
Quality, original content
To search engines, new content matters a lot. When you consider new content, that applies to all pages on your website, your blog and other online content sources. In a recent piece for Moz, Cyrus Shepard outlined the various factors that affect a website’s “freshness” score on Google.
“The age of a webpage or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.
For example, changing a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.”—Cyrus Shepard, Moz
Think about ways to keep your content fresh, but keep in mind that pages that change frequently can be scored on a different scale than more static pages. Links on more static pages, for example, may be given more weight.
So, make changes strategically and use back-end engagement data to help inform your strategy.
Click-through rates (CTR)
One key metric for customer engagement is your click-through rate, which can impact your search ranking:
“What you need to do is get more people to click on your result. If you start getting more clicks than your competitor, Google will take notice and start thinking that maybe your page is actually the best result for searchers, because more people are clicking on it and engaging with it.”—Larry Kim, Search Engine Journal
Once that link is clicked, the next challenge is to keep your customer on that page by successfully answering his or her question. Once again, that comes down to providing quality content.
Inbound links
As your site earns new, quality links from other websites and sources, it can improve your search rankings. These inbound links signal to search engines that your site is attracting visitors; new links point to quality content that people are actually reading and using.
“It’s almost impossible to see any meaningful search engine optimization (SEO) results without spending some time building and honing your inbound link profile.”—Jayson DeMers, Search Engine Land
Your website is a living, breathing entity. Approach all of your online content as such. In the digital marketing world, you cannot afford to post once and forget it. You need an ongoing content marketing strategy and SEO approach to support better search rankings and to attract new customers.
To learn more about Campfire Digital’s digital marketing approach and SEO strategy, contact us to schedule your free consultation.