Optimizing your website can seem like an impossible task, but if you break it down into parts, it’s simpler than you might think. Start by focusing on these simple SEO tips that work for every website, and almost any business, to build a solid SEO structure that will have you high up in the search rankings.

Create a Solid Structure

Implementing cool, new SEO tips won’t make any difference if your website structure isn’t solid for search.  Design your website in a way that makes it easy for search engine crawlers to index, which starts with creating a clearly established page hierarchy.

Your website will need pages, categories, subcategories, headings, subheadings, and an interlinking strategy that glues the website structure together. This not only helps search engines to quickly understand what your website is about, and rank it accordingly, but it also helps your human clients find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily  – which means fewer drop-offs and more conversions.

Put Quality First

Quality content is one of the keys to high ranking search results. Google is considering the quality of content more than ever before, so whether you’re a small or large business, it’s important to ensure that your content is truly unique, informative, interesting and well written. Your headlines, meta descriptions, and body content should all match the relative keywords in a natural manner – Google penalizes sites that try to stuff the keyword in as many times as possible.

Quality content isn’t just about words, either. Videos and photos can provide significant engagement, however, it’s important to make sure that they’re clearly labeled and that the meta descriptions match what the content is about, to avoid user or bot confusion.

Lighten your Load

Site speed is one of the top tips in SEO management, so one simple task you could take on would be to improve your website’s loading time. There are several ways to do this. However, one of the easiest ones is to delete any content that’s slowing down your loading. This could be large/old pictures, unused videos or discontinued products; or old website elements such as browser caches, unnecessary CSS  or JavaScript.

Confused about where to start? Hire an SEO professional to consult on improving your load speed. A few hours of work here can make a significant difference in your search engine results.

Go Mobile

These days, desktop websites are practically passé. Websites built for mobile have become a focal point for both web design and search engine indexing since mobile traffic began to outpace desktop browsing in 2016. That means if you’re out to improve your business’s ranking, you’ll need to go mobile, first.

Hopefully, you’ve designed and built a mobile responsive website from the beginning, however, if you haven’t, now’s the time to start. Focus on mobile UX, design, and loading, and you’ll see your search rankings quickly soar.

Keeping Tabs

No matter what changes your implementing, you need to monitor their effectiveness. Decide on what metric you’re aiming for – is your conversion goal signups, online store purchases, or simply entering customer information in a contact form? Whatever your metric is, keep tabs on all your SEO activities to see what changes will best help you to reach said goals. Try keeping your work to one major change at a time to see what makes the most difference, and remember, SEO is a never-ending game. You’ll need to keep up with market trends to know what changes you should be making on your website, so your business doesn’t get left behind.

You should approach SEO methodically. Try out all your ideas using A/B testing and follow along with the metrics to see what works and what falls flat. Monitoring your successes isn’t just helpful for knowing where to put your resources – it also means you can replicate your work for future projects.

Let’s be clear: every business needs to have a call to action (or CTA) on their website, even if it is just on their homepage.

It instructs readers what to do. Without it, businesses run the risk of having their readers do a skim and read, and drop off their website.

This could affect bounce rates, but what really hits home for companies is that the reader probably only grazed the surface of their site, service, or product.

This is where a good CTA comes into play. Read on to learn 6 ways you can beef up your CTA creation strategy.

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 1. Do They Want to Click on It?

As the name suggests, a call to action is just that: a call to action. As Forbes mentioned, it is the “action” part that a lot of business owners and marketers miss out on.

In order to incorporate the action part into your CTA, ask yourself: what do you want the reader to click on? What do you want them to gain from landing on this page?

Forbes goes on to state that you want to make sure the CTA is relevant to where the reader is in your sales funnel. In other words, is this reader at the top of the funnel? Middle? Bottom?

For those at the top, perhaps add a CTA such as “Subscribe Now.” Readers who are in the middle of the funnel may benefit from a CTA like “Learn More” or “Free Trial.”

And those at the bottom who are close to converting would need instructions in what to do next: “Buy Now” or “Click to Purchase.”

(On a similar note, read Website Builders vs. Hard Coding: Which is Right for Your Business? — Perth Web Design.)

Photo by Vanessa Serpas on Unsplash

2. Limit the Options

People buy more when their options are limited; if there are too many, the individual may leave, feeling overwhelmed and confused.

Think In-N-Out. The infamous American fast food chain is known for their limited menu items.

For instance, they only give consumers three burger options: double-double, cheeseburger, and hamburger.

Contrary to popular belief, this works. In-N-Out, despite its short menu list, is still going strong, with abc7 reporting that the fast food chain is expanding to Colorado.

What In-N-Out has to do with CTA is this: Make your CTA simple. Don’t overwhelm your reader by placing them everywhere on the page, and make sure the message is short and straightforward.

                                          Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

3. Get Excited

Make your CTA pop out among the other standard CTAs—such as “Click Here.” Add some excitement with, as Forbes states, a CTA like “Yes, Take Me There!” The “Me” makes it more personal. Plus, the overall tone is energetic and exciting.

4. Make Your CTA Stand Out

Is your page mostly blue? Have your CTA—such as “Book a One-Way Charter Flight”— stand out by making it a different color. That way, when the reader visits your page, immediately his or her eyes will be drawn to the CTA. Enough said.

5. What You Put Next to Your CTA Matters

It is not just how your CTA looks or what it says that is important. You need to be aware of what you put around it.

According to Entrepreneur, social proof around your CTA—think testimonies and case studies—increases conversion rates.

Make sure though that the testimonies and case studies are genuine and speak to what your business offers its consumers.

Final Thoughts

Besides these tips, consider using A/B split testing software to get data on what works for your CTA and what doesn’t.

What other tips do you have that helps businesses boost their CTA creation strategy? What has your experience been using CTAs? Do you believe CTA trends have changed? Be sure to leave a comment below.

Ashley Lipman

Ashley is a super-connector with Outreachmama who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition.

Like it or not, SEO is an essential part of any digital strategy, and if you’re looking for online success, it’s not one that should be left behind.

Many businesses have SEO on their to-do list, but that doesn’t mean it’s getting the attention it deserves, and that may be because many business owners don’t entirely understand WHY SEO is so important.

Read on to discover why SEO is essential to the success of your business, and what value it can offer you (beyond visibility).

Improved User Experience

In its essence, SEO aims to create a strong, well-designed website with quality content and excellent user experience. SEO makes your website easy to find, easy to use, and ultimately provides your visitors with the service or information they’re looking for without a hassle.

These qualities don’t only improve your search ranking – they also make for a better user experience, which means your all-important clients will be happier with the service you provide. Satisfied clients, happy business owners.

Trust & Credibility

Anyone can build a website these days – so how do you stand out from the noise? High ranking websites have some similar qualities: they have positive user behavior, optimized on-page elements, and a quality backlink profile, which makes them credible, authoritative sources of information in their industries.

These same qualities that make a website SEO friendly also improve the credibility of the website, and thus of your brand. The authority that puts your website high in the search ranking is the same that leads customers looking for information to trust your company’s offerings.

Increased Conversions

Working on SEO is about creating a better website structure that makes it easier for bots to crawl, which also makes your website easier for your human customers to use. So, at the same time, you’re upping your SEO ante, you’ll be improving the conversion rate of your website, naturally.

SEO’s goal is to optimize your website for engagement and traffic flow – which also means that you’re more likely to get users to your end goal. Whether that end goal is an online purchase, an inquiry, hitting the contact page or simply clicking on a product, quality SEO – aka a well-designed, easy to use, highly informative site – will help get your users there.

Organic Search Still Rules

Organic search is still, in most cases, the primary source of website traffic for the majority of websites, and it’s a huge part of most website’s performance stats. Organic search is also an essential part of the purchase funnel – and about 75% of the search world these days is owned by Google.

Following Google’s SEO rules isn’t just a way to get more visibility in search, however. It also means you’ll also get better listings in Google Map searches, on Google’s My Business section, and in Gmail emails. Being highly visible in Google’s universe isn’t just great for searches – it adds credibility and that’s always going to work in your brand’s favor.

Increasing Real-Time Traffic

Local SEO works to improve your digital footprint inside of a specific, geographic region – be it a town, city, or even state – to make your brand more visible amongst local searchers. Thanks to the prevalence of mobile internet users, local search rankings are taking over the digital strategy of small and medium-sized businesses.

Regionally targeted searches aren’t just about driving web traffic, either. Local SEO can increase the number of physical visits to your brick-and-mortar location, too. High local search rankings will help new customers find your business quickly and easily, getting them one step closer to a purchase transaction.

It’s Low Cost, High Reward

Sure, optimizing your website does take some effort, so if you don’t feel you have enough bandwidth, consider hiring a reputable SEO company. Compared to purchasing keywords, SEO is relatively inexpensive, and the payoff can be huge. Great SEO isn’t a simple marketing cost – it’s an investment in the well-being of your business. So giving it the time, attention, and resources, it deserves, will only lead to bigger and better successes in your business’s future.

Getting SEO right starts with having a great foundation. If you don’t know the basics of SEO, no amount of optimization is going to get your website to the top. Read on to learn some of the ground rules to SEO that you’ll need to know to get your website off on a sound search footing.

Website Structure

The first thing that you need for high ranking search results is to build your website using a solid structure, including bot accessibility, dedicated hosting, mobile design, schema markup and sitemaps. You’ll want to make sure that your URL structure and your internal link architecture is search-friendly.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense to you from the start. A good web developer will be able to implement all of these into your website, and it’s worth the investment to make sure your website’s foundation is solid from the very beginning.

Unique content

Another critical factor in building your website is being sure that you fill it with quality, unique content. Duplicate content – text or images you’ve copied from somewhere else on the web – won’t rank; and neither will unnecessary, superfluous, or poorly written content that’s just trying to get keyword hits. Search bots are more sophisticated than you might imagine, and if you’re looking to get high up in searches, you’ll need to provide your own unique and relevant content to do so.

If writing isn’t your forte, you can always hire a professional content writer to make sure your website content is original and up to par.

Title Right

The title tag on your homepage is one of the most important parts of your website. It should be the main focus of your business, and hopefully, the main traffic driver as well.

A few tips for choosing a title: if your business is local, include the city or town’s name in the title tag to ensure you’ll rank in locally-based searches. You don’t want to be competing in nationwide searches when your most important clients are searching locally!

Backlinking

Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your site, and they are one of the keys to Google’s search algorithm. However, with backlinks, quality beats quantity every time.

Acquiring backlinks can be tricky – you need to get highly authoritative websites in your market – be it in your region or in your industry – to link to your website, naturally, for these links to help your search ranking. Considering signing up for services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out), where you can respond to questions from media outlets on behalf of your company. It might just get you some links in the digital media, which could rocket your website’s search ranking.

You can also use digital PR tactics to increase your links. Reaching out to industry related websites, groups, or partners to add links to their websites back to you are all great tactics to improve your backlink search rating.

Local Listings

If you haven’t been paying attention to your Google My Business page, it’s time to start, as it’s one of the main ways that Google ranks local businesses in map searches.

Go to My Business and make sure that all of your information is correct, and your photos are up to date. Be proactive with asking customers for reviews, and then measure your views via the insights section to see what sort of response your business is having in local searches. As with any metrics, the key is to monitor, and modify when needed to improve your online ranking.

Keep it up!

It is vital for successful SEO to keep your site up to date, legitimate and mobile-friendly. Create ongoing, stellar content on a blog that is easily viewed on a desktop, tablet or phone, and actively promote your content via Facebook or other social media.

All of these will help to improve your search ranking and drive more traffic to your website, ultimately adding to your overall business success.

Maintaining your website content and performing a successful SEO strategy is ongoing. To stay ahead of the game, enlist the services of a qualified SEO company to keep your rankings on page 1.