SEO can make numerous positive contributions to your tech company’s bottom line. Whether it be through building credibility and trust, improving your web user’s experience or accelerating the buying cycle, your business needs SEO now more than ever.
However, with 61% of marketers looking to improve their SEO, competition is fierce, especially within tech-driven search categories. In order to stay ahead of the competition, you need to ensure your team has a plan to execute and benchmarks to measure against.
Where do you start to know that your team and partners are approaching 2019 SEO planning strategically? To improve organic search rankings and conversions for your company’s website this year, align your strategy to attack the three pillars of SEO.
PILLAR #1: ON-SITE SEO
On-site SEO is all about the CONTENT that lives on your site! Everyone writing content for your site should adhere to the following guidelines:
Make content unique and valuable- High-quality content will not only resonate with search engines but will resonate with your users as well. Users are more likely to share and trust content that provides true value to them (Hello backlinks - read on for why this provides two-fold value). How do you achieve this? Write to people (your personas!) - not search engines.
Create new content consistently to keep your site freshly crawled and indexed in search engines- A blog is an excellent way to post new content that adheres to the rule of being relevant for search engines and users. We recommend that you blog on a weekly basis if possible. It’s important to be cognizant of how much your competitors blog as well, so you can make sure to stay stride for stride, if not a stride above them.
Write long, in-depth content utilizing images throughout- The average Google first page result has over 1,500 words in it! As we mentioned, quantity is important, but so is quality. Quality doesn’t mean forcing in unnecessary info and keywords just to meet this word count. It’s really most important to know your audience - like how we know that you’re busy, so we decided to keep this post slightly shorter for you!
Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to find new keywords relevant to your topics-Make sure not to stuff these keywords into your content, but to naturally weave them in where they fit.
PILLAR #2: OFF-SITE SEO
ou might be asking, “What in the world would anything, not on my site have to do with my site’s SEO?”
To put this into context, think of an off-line, real-world scenario: In a typical job interview process, there comes a time when a candidate must provide referrals. These referrals are able to vouch for them, back up their skills and verify that they’re a legitimate employee worth hiring. They’re a huge reason you end up hiring somebody!
In the SEO world, off-site SEO contains your referrals.
Consider this: Your MarTech company writes a new blog about how blockchain technology is playing a fundamental role in eliminating ad fraud in the programmatic ecosystem. Due to the quality of content and relevance to users, both Adweek and MarTech Today decide to write an article and link back to your blog. Both of these high-value publications have confirmed your site’s trustworthiness and domain authority in the eyes of Google, other search engines and users who read the article, helping your site rank.
Gaining these backlinks is not easy though. That’s where PR comes in. (Shameless plug: To get an idea for what publications Alloy could get your company in to increase your domain authority, check out our results page.)
PILLAR #3: TECHNICAL SEO
Proper technical development and setup of a website help search engines easily crawl and index your site. To keep the analogies coming at you, think of sound technical SEO as a highly organized file server complete with labels and folders so that you can find any document you need and share it with other members of your organization.
To ensure your site is technically organized, share the following checklist with your team:
1. Make sure your site is secure and uses HTTPS markup.
2. Use search-friendly URLs:
Don’t use special characters such as “@” or “&.”
Use hyphens (-) instead of spaces.
Include keywords to indicate what the page is about, but don’t overstuff or make the URL too long.
Use proper parent URL structure. For example, a blog page URL should probably look like “https://www.site.com/example-post.”
3. Ensure that your site is mobile friendly.
4. Update your metadata: Make sure every page has a unique meta title and meta description that lets users know what the page is about.
5. Submit your XML Sitemap to Google Search Console so that Google can easily crawl your site.
6. Make sure your robots.txt file allows search engines to crawl your site’s pages.
7. Put 301 redirects into place for any site migrations so you don’t lose valuable domain authority!
8. Remove any 404’s and dead-end links. Not only does this lower your search rankings, but it also leads to poor user experience.
9. Check your site load time. If slow, this could affect your organic rankings.
ONE FOR ALL AND ALL FOR ONE
Keep in mind that all of these pillars work together to increase your SEO efforts, much likeAlloy’s Methodology. No one effort will ascend your organic rankings alone, but by ensuring your internal team and external partners are using all of these efforts in tandem, you can make organic search a traffic-driver and converter for your company.
Need help executing your 2019 SEO Game Plan? Get in touch with us today.