The way websites look and perform is changing rapidly. Google has already changed its SEO rankings factors. Today, SEO isn’t just about embedding keywords in your website content. Right now, from your site speed to the visuals you have used in its layout are also part of the SEO.
A new study by Stone Temple Consulting found that “the percentage of visits attributed to organic search engine results has grown from 60% in 2009 to 69% in 2017.” The same study also found that “visits attributed to social media sites have declined from 24% in 2009 to 20%” over the same period of time.
What this means for you as a marketer, is it’s more important than ever before to make sure your site is optimised so it can rank well with organic searches.
So, let’s not waste any more time, and let’s check out how you can better optimise your website in 2021.
13 Easy Methods to SEO Optimise Your Website in 2022
According to the latest web design statistics, it only takes 5 seconds for a visitor to form an opinion about your website and decide whether to stay or leave.
On top of it, 88% of online users won’t revisit your website if they didn’t receive a good user experience the first time. That means not only search engine crawlers but also users like well-optimised websites.
So, let’s not waste any more time and unleash the full potential of your website in 2022 by following these SEO website optimisation methods:
1. Choose the simple and specific domain name
The first website development step is to select a domain name. The domain name is the identity of your website. It is the address that people will use to search for you online. Importantly, search engines will index your website based on its domain name value.
Therefore, it is important to select a website domain name after thorough consideration. Usually, people set their company name as a website domain name. But if your company name’s domain is already booked or you don’t have a company, select the domain relevant to your targeted industry.
For example, SEO Troupe is a dedicated marketing blog that aims to provide the marketer community with the most up-to-date SEO and marketing facts and insights. From the name, it is clear for both the users and search engines what’s the context of the website. Similarly, you have to choose a website domain that’s relevant to your industry. If possible, use the main keyword in the domain.
2. Find the reliable hosting partner
Website speed is the main SEO ranking factor for Google. The slow-loading websites are bad for search engine rankings and user experience. Since website hosting plays a significant role in determining the speed of your website; thus, it is important to find a reliable hosting provider.
The hosting provider also helps to manage and organise your website. Therefore, select your hosting provider carefully after running complete market research. Nowadays, there are many great web hosting providers available like Bluehost, GoDaddy, and many more.
3. Use an SEO-friendly content management platform
Once you have selected an SEO-friendly domain and reliable hosting provider, the next step is to use the right content management platform to develop your site. The CMS platform helps you better optimise your website for search engines and users.
Many CMS options are available today like Drupal, Magento, WordPress, WooCommerce, and many more. But for easy SEO optimisation, WordPress is the best platform. In fact, 455 million websites use WordPress today.
WordPress has several SEO-friendly themes and plugins such as Yoast SEO, TrustSEO, and many more.
4. Work on your website architecture
Website architecture sounds complicated, but it is not. The website architecture simply implies how all the pages on your website are linked together.
Keep the website architecture as simple as possible. Why?
That’s because if you follow complex architecture, Google will have a hard time finding and indexing all your web pages.
Use a block architecture that Google algorithm can easily understand.
5. Declutter your website design
Website design helps to make websites look more attractive, engaging, and SEO-friendly. While designing your website layout, it might sound like a good plan to use lots of high-quality images, content, and other visual elements.
According to the latest web design research, the majority of people (40%) believe that images and colour (39%) are the most noticeable elements in web design.
But you should refrain from adding too many visual-heavy elements on your web pages. On website designs, less is more concept works the best.
In fact, Imagescape saw a 160% increase in their form submissions after reducing fields to 11 from 14. (Source: ConversionCow)
Therefore, follow minimal rules while designing your website layout, such as:
- Use lots of white space to make each section highlight properly.
- Remove unnecessary content and use headlines to convey your brand’s message.
- Compress images before uploading on your website or use lazy loads to ensure bulky visuals won’t impact your website speed.
- Reduce distractions and only put useful information on homepages.
6. Focus on mobile optimisation
There are around 5.29 billion mobile phone users in the world today. And mobile phone users are growing at a rate of 1.9% per year.
Therefore, it is essential for you to optimise your website for mobile SEO. To target small mobile screens, you have to pay attention to several design elements, including:
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) markup is an official part of Google now, so leverage AMP to target SERP.
- Use mobile responsive website themes that you will easily find online WordPress store, ThemeForest, etc.
- Add big CTA buttons and links to make it easy for users to take action on mobiles.
- Compress content and visuals for mobile devices.
7. Embed keywords properly
Keywords are the vital SEO ranking factor. But all your high-performing keywords will do you no good unless you embed keywords at the right place on your website.
There are certain places on your web pages and posts where adding targeted keywords will improve SEO score a lot, such as:
- Use the main keyword in the title, metadata, and headline of each page
- Sprinkle LSA keywords in the body of your webpage
- Add keywords in the image alt text
- Put keywords in the body or any subheading, etc.
8. Work on link building
As per the latest link building stats, 56.3 percent of marketers believe that the quality and quantity of links are important factors in SEO.
Here you have to work on both external and internal link building. Internal links allow search engines to crawl through different web pages available on your website. Similarly, external linking helps to build brand authority and content authenticity, as Google likes when you use high-quality backlinks to validate your information.
However, avoid using external links on main web pages. Also, use the proper anchor text to link other web pages.
9. Make it easy for people to contact you
It is concluded that consumers are likely to trust a business more when they can easily contact people at the company.
On the other hand, Google uses the company’s contact information to better rank and understand its context. Therefore, it is important to add a contact us page on your website to make it easy for people to contact you.
On your contact us page, includes the following information:
- The physical address of your office if you have any
- Email address or phone number to contact different team heads
- Contact us forum
- Link to all your social media pages if anyone wants to directly message
- Chatbots for quick chatting
- Other relevant information like when you like your office’s open/close time, how many working days you take to reply to emails, etc.
Besides creating a dedicated contact us page, put your company email, phone number, or social media links on the top of every page. This way, visitors can easily reach out to you.
10. Create a simple navigation system
The navigation system is the structure of your website that allows users to find relevant pages and links on your site. Both visitors and search engine crawlers prefer the simple navigation system because nobody has time to understand your complex website layout.
The best practice here is to create your navigation menu with breadcrumbs and tabs. Breadcrumbs is a graphic control trail used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It allows users to maintain a record of their location on a web page and go back any time.
Today, there are plenty of different navigation menus used by web designers to make websites attractive. But the most popular one is a horizontal approach. In this, web pages are side-by-side placed in the website header like “Products,” “About Us,” and “Contact Us.”
11. Elevate homepage with videos and images
By 2022, 88% of all internet traffic will come from video streaming or downloads. Google has also made video SEO a vital ranking factor lately.
Therefore, you should reduce the text part on your homepage and focus more on videos or photos. This will help you in two ways:
First, you can target video marketing channels like YouTube, Dailymotion, or Vimeo. Secondly, visuals are more memorable than written text.
12. Publish blogs on your website
Blogs are the best and easy way to boost your website’s SEO score. By publishing blogs, you can target numerous keywords and links on your website. The websites that frequently publish blogs always have higher traffic and SEO scores.
Though it is important to publish blogs in the appropriate manner, otherwise, they won’t deliver the desired results. Here are a few tips for driving maximum ROI from blogs:
- Constantly publish high-quality blogs
- Target topics that can help or provide value to your readers
- Use high-performing keywords in the title, meta description, and heading of the blog
- Interlink internal pages within your blog post
- Add a clear call to action link
- Use high-quality images and videos with appropriate alt text
- Provide a featured image to your blog to appear in Google search results, etc.
13. Keep up with Google’s algorithm updates
Finally, keep an eye on Google algorithm updates. Google frequently tweaks its algorithm to provide a better user experience. However, Google never shares its algorithm details, but you will get the gist of new SEO rules by following Google.
For this, you can follow Google’s official social media pages, or you can subscribe to marketing and SEO blog sites, news, and other digital marketing magazines.
Parting Thoughts
It’s no secret that to drive more traffic online, you must first create an SEO-friendly website. When your site is friendly to search engines, you’ll appear in more relevant search results and boost traffic on your website.
The key to success here is to plan and streamline your SEO process with your website development. This way, you can develop a website that search engines can quickly identify and index.
So, make SEO a hero element of your website and nothing will stop you from expanding your digital footprints.