5 Tips to Improve SEO & Get New Visitors to Your Website

By Leah Hooks
November 10, 2021

Do you feel like no one is actually seeing any of the content you worked so hard to put on your website? It’s time to work on your SEO. If you haven’t worked with SEO before, it can seem daunting and overwhelming, but we will help to break it down with these tips.

First: What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of increasing traffic to a website through organic search engine results. In other words, improving SEO makes it more likely that a website shows up on the first page of results when someone searches for a term relating to the company on Google or another search engine.

Why Should I Spend Time Improving SEO?

Now that you know what it is, why should you spend your time working to improve SEO? Although this will take time, improving SEO is the best way to attract new visitors to a website – and it doesn’t require a marketing or advertising budget!

Below are five tips for improving SEO that will help increase website traffic.

1. Produce new, quality content on a regular basis and utilize other platforms to promote it.

  • Start Blogging: If your website doesn’t already have a blog, now is the time to create one. But it doesn’t end there! Make sure that you have a consistent posting schedule for new content. A problem that some groups run into is posting too frequently at the start and then running out of new ideas. Instead, pace yourself and stick to a schedule, even if that’s just one blog post every quarter.
  • Link back to your website in social posts: Once you have new blog content on your site, utilize your social media channels to promote it. Post on your channels with a sentence or two about the blog content and link to the full blog post on your website for more information.
  • Partner with well-respected organizations and bloggers: Do you have respected partners in the community? Reach out to them and connect with others, asking them to link to your blog posts or other pages of your website on their sites. Having backlinks to your site from other respected sites improves SEO. NOTE: Only add outside links to your own site if the source is a trusted partner. Having links on your site that go to disguised scam websites will hurt credibility.

2. Improve page loading speed.

  • Check How Fast Your Website Loads: Do you know how quickly your website loads for first time users on computers and on mobile? People have a very short attention span when it comes to browsing the internet. If a website takes too long to load, visitors will leave quickly. According to a report by Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Check out free services like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how long it takes for visitors to see everything on your website. This will analyze your site and give specific callouts as to what on your site is causing issues and needs to be addressed.
  • Optimize Images: One of the most common things called out in these insights is the optimization of your website’s images. Using images that are too large has a huge impact on website load speed. Ensure that all images on your site are optimized for the web by cropping and resizing them before you upload them to your site. This decreases the overall file size and allows them to load more quickly. Check to see the display resolution of images on your site and ensure that you are not uploading images with extra pixels that will only make the image file unnecessarily large. Images can also be compressed to decrease the file size without losing noticeable image quality. While you’re working to upload optimized images to your site, go ahead and add alt text! We’ll talk about this more with keywords.
  • Remove Unused Plugins: Are you working on a WordPress site that has been around for a while, with multiple people working on it? Take a look at all of the plugins that are currently installed. Chances are, there are at least a few that are no longer used. Once you have ensured that a plugin is not in use on your site anymore, delete it from the site.

3. Find and fix any broken links.

When is the last time you went through every page and post of your website to make sure all the links are still working? Google web crawlers, or bots, check sites for broken links. A site with multiple links that no longer go to an active page, and instead link to an error message, are given lower priority in search results.

Don’t have time to check every page? Check Google Analytics to see the pages of your site with the most traffic and start there to ensure links people are actively seeing all work properly.

4. Ensure your site is optimized for mobile use.

According to Hitwise, 58% of Google searches are done from mobile devices. According to StatCounter, mobile devices made up 54.3% of the market share of web traffic globally in the last year, compared to 43.3% desktops and 2.5% tablets. It is very important to ensure that a website is easy to navigate on a mobile device, not just on a desktop computer.

5. Research and use keywords.

Research your industry and determine key words that people are using when searching for the information found on your website. Determine what keywords your competitors are using by visiting their sites, right clicking on their pages, and viewing the page source code. There you can find what terms they are using in their meta titles and descriptions. Once you know what keywords you should be using, make sure you include them in your website’s:

  • Metadata: Adding Metadata to your webpages can be done manually within the HTML code, or by using plugins such as Yoast SEO. Meta titles and descriptions for pages and posts should be varied and compelling and fit within character limits. Although meta descriptions do not have a limit, Google generally cuts them off after 155-160 characters. For that reason, it is best to keep meta descriptions between 50 and 155 characters. Meta titles should be 60 characters or less. Be sure to use keywords specific to each page in these titles and descriptions – you don’t want to compete with your own website for views, so be sure to use varied content for each page.
  • Page Text: Looking at the same keywords that you determined for each page earlier, weave those terms into the actual text included on the body of the page.
  • URLs: Set your URLs to also include these terms. URLs should be clean, readable and descriptive. Longer or non-descriptive URL strings, such as URLs that are automatically generated for a new website post that consist of random letters and numbers, can discourage clicks.
  • Picture Alt Text: Alt text for pictures provides a text alternative for an image which helps search engines and those using screen readers determine what is included in the image. When writing alt text for images, be descriptive, brief and unique. Ensure that the alt text for your images also includes relevant keywords. This will boost your SEO in Google Image Searches as well as improving the overall visibility and optimization of your website.

Want to learn more about SEO for your website and how Inspire PR can help? Reach out to us today!