What You Need To Know About Optimizing Your Website for SEO
Optimizing your website for SEO is a crucial step for every business with an online presence. It ensures that your website can be indexed by search engines and found by your potential customers.
So, let’s look at the SEO optimization closer and why you want to optimize your website after launch for long-term business success.
What is SEO optimization?
SEO optimization is the practice of optimizing web pages to improve your site’s search engine rankings and organic traffic level. Google uses automated web crawlers that crawl the web and always look for websites to index in their search.
When Google web crawlers find a new website they haven’t indexed before, they’ll look at a few key things:
Google’s main priority is to index high-quality content valuable to people who are searching. So, when you launch your website, you want to make sure that you optimize all those things for SEO so that Google and other search engines can find your website and start indexing it correctly.
Sometimes people think that SEO optimization is a one-time thing with immediate results. However, that’s not how it works. SEO optimization doesn’t happen overnight – it can take a while for Google to start showing your website at the top of their organic search results.
Because Google and other search engines work hard to ensure their algorithms are serving the best value and keeping the web free from potentially low-quality websites, SEO optimization is also not a one-time thing. To keep up with the changing technology, you’ll want to always keep on top of the newest requirements consistently.
On-page SEO versus external SEO
When you optimize your website for SEO, you have to think about two different types of SEO. There is on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Both are equally important to ensure the success of your SEO campaign, but they involve different things.
On-page SEO is about optimizing the parts of your website that are in your control and involves optimizing your website so that when search engine crawlers crawl the web and come across your website, they can index it easily.
Here are the things that are considered on-page SEO:
It’s a lot of nitty-gritty work to optimize your website and requires a technical understanding of websites. So, if you’re not tech-savvy and feel unsure about how to do all the on-page SEO yourself, here at WAcademy, we offer the On-page SEO service that does all the on-page SEO optimization for you.
Now, external SEO optimization or off-page SEO is the process during which you work on improving the authority of your domain through external sources like building backlinks to your website.
On-page SEO shows Google that your website is high-quality and valuable, which allows Google to index your website in the search engines, while off-page SEO shows Google that other people find your website valuable and trustworthy.
You can build quality backlinks by:
3 Key reasons why you need to optimize your website for SEO
1. Get ranked in search engines
Ranking high in search engines is the number one goal of many businesses. The results on the first page of Google get the 92% of traffic, and the first listing at the top of the page receives even 33% of all the clicks.
Before the rise of SEO optimization, ranking on the first page wasn’t difficult. However, with the competition rising, it’s way harder now to rank at the top of the results for any keywords, and it requires much more work and time.
When you’re thinking about optimizing your website for SEO, it’s important to set realistic goals for your business. It will take a while to rank in search, and it will take a lot of work to create valuable, high-quality content and build the authority of your domain.
Generally, SEO experts say that it can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months for a page to rank at the top for a certain keyword in search engines. But the results vary, and sometimes it can take less than that or more.
When marketing expert Neil Patel conducted a study to see how long on average it takes for a page to rank to number 1 on Google, he found that it takes about 3.39 months or around 100 days. However, he points out that many variables can affect how fast or slow a website ranks, so the results can vary from business to business.
2. Grow organic traffic
Focusing on growing organic traffic to your website is the key to the long-term success of your business. And SEO optimization can help you with that.
When comparing the lead closing rates between organic leads and those that come from paid sources, the difference is massive. Organic leads have a closing rate of 14.6%, while the outbound marketing leads’ closing rate is 1.7%.
So, even if your business uses paid marketing to bring in new customers, it’s smart to invest in growing your organic traffic for the long-term benefit of your business.
3. Reach your target audience
When you optimize your website for SEO with content marketing the right way, you can create a funnel that allows you to reach your target audience and turn them into paying customers automatically.
If you create high-quality, valuable content that people are searching for in your niche, and you make sure that you’re optimizing it for on-page and off-page SEO, people will land on your website. Once they read your blog and like it, they’ll notice the newsletter sign-up that offers something of value in exchange for their email. And once they’re inside your email list, it means that they’re interested in buying from you.
It’s a long-term process that’ll take some time to take off, but once it does, you can automate the majority of the funnel and reach your target audience the most efficiently.
How to optimize your website for SEO
1. Make sure it’s mobile-friendly
Statistics show that even 68.1% of website visits come from mobile devices. Because of how users are accessing the internet, Google also prioritizes websites that are mobile-friendly when ranking websites in their search.
The things that make your website mobile-friendly are:
WAcademy On-page SEO service makes sure that your website is mobile-friendly, so you don’t have to worry about this part of your website and focus on other aspects of your business.
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is a huge part of your website’s successful long-term SEO optimization. The best way to start with it is by creating a blog on your website where you share high-value and quality educational content that your target audience would search for.
Research your keywords and make sure you target less popular, more niche ones and long-tail keywords to rank faster and higher. If you go for high competition popular keywords, it will take longer to rank while you still don’t have high domain authority.
To make the best out of your content marketing, you should also set up an email marketing campaign that allows you to use your blog content to onboard new people to your email list. Create a lead magnet that compliments your blog posts and offers further value to your audience and ask for their email in exchange for it.
3. Building Backlinks
When you optimize your website for SEO, it’s important to remember to build backlinks. They are links from other websites on the internet (preferably high quality and authority) to your website. As we discussed before, this is the crucial part of off-page SEO, and it helps tell Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy.
The easiest way to start with the backlinks is by reaching out to other website and blog owners in your industry and writing guest blogs for their websites. Usually, they’ll allow a link back to your website, so you can slowly start building that authority and rank higher in Google search.
Word of caution: there are people offering backlinking for money, and while their offers might be lucrative, it’s best to stay clear from them. It’s easy to mess up your standing with Google with the wrong websites and shady links, and when you do it yourself or hire a professional to help you with it, you can be sure that everything you do is according to Google’s rules.
4. Pay attention to the speed
Slow websites deter the users from staying longer and exploring more. Google says that for eCommerce websites, the sites should load under 2 seconds, and the rest should aim for under 0.5 seconds. But generally, you should aim for 1-2 second load time to ensure that most people who visit your website stay.
The speed of your website depends on many variables – the image size, the plugins you use, your hosting company, the theme you’re using, and more. And you can easily check the speed of your website with tools like GTmetrix that will allow you to see how your website performs and where to improve.
When you order the WAcademy On-page SEO optimization service, the optimization of your website’s speed is included in the package, so everything will be taken care of for you.
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO optimization is the part of the SEO optimization process that allows the search engine to crawl and index your website more efficiently. It can also be referred to as on-page SEO optimization, and it includes:
Sometimes people get confused between technical SEO and other SEO optimization tactics. These are the things that are not considered to be a part of technical SEO:
Once you’re ready to optimize your website for SEO, you can start by booking WAcademy On-page SEO service to take care of the technical side of SEO so search engines can start indexing your website today.
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Subject line suggestion: On-page SEO versus off-page SEO – what’s the difference?
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Many people think of on-page SEO and off-page SEO as the same thing when it comes to SEO optimization. However, these two SEO strategies are very different.
Off-page SEO is the part of SEO that focuses on external optimization like content marketing and backlink building. Its primary goal is to help your website rank higher in the search engines by increasing your domain authority.
On-page SEO or technical SEO, on the other hand, is all about optimizing your website from the inside. It includes optimizing headlines, HTML tags, image alt text, and making sure that your website is ready to be indexed by the search engines.
If you want to learn more about the differences between on-page and off-page SEO and learn how you can optimize your website for SEO, read the full blog post on our blog here.
