Hi, builders! Welcome to our discussion on all things search engine optimization. You already know that a strong SEO strategy increases your website’s visibility (and subsequently impacts sales) — so are you up to date on the latest know-how? If not, you’re in the right place! Our experts broke down today’s top SEO tactics:
- What is SERP?
SERP stands for “search engine results pages.” They can include organic search results, ad placements, featured snippets, knowledge graphs, videos, and more. For organic search results, there are 10 organic positions per search result page.
Improving your organic ranking position in SERP is one of the primary focuses of SEO!
- What is local SEO?
Over the past 2 years, “near me” search queries have increased by 150% due to the increased usage of mobile devices. Local SEO focuses on ranking higher for search results like “home builders near me” within your local area. There are a number of important factors that impact local SEO like Google My Business listings, link building, and targeting locally relevant keywords within your website’s content.
3. What does technical SEO mean?
Technical SEO encompasses the aspects of improving a website’s performance in order to improve its visibility in search engines. There are many technical factors that can impact how search engines understand a website:
Speed: Studies have shown that a user will leave a website if it doesn’t open within 3 seconds. If your website is slow, that means you’re missing out on traffic. Search engines recognize when a website offers a poor user experience, which can cause limited visibility in organic search results of that website.
Crawlability: To understand the structure of a website, search engines will use “spiders” to crawl the site. Having things like a great internal linking structure, an XML sitemap, and robots.txt file will help these spiders better understand the architecture of your website, improving the likelihood that it will be served higher in organic results.
Security: Implementing an HTTPs for your domain using an SSL certificate is a crucial aspect of website security. Google and other search engines recognize website security as an important ranking factor.
4. What is link building?
Backlinks, also known as “inbound links,” are created when one website links to another. Quality backlinks from websites with high “domain authority” indicate to search engines that a website is authoritative and trustworthy. Reaching out to relevant, industry websites in order to create backlinking opportunities is an important part of link building.
While it’s important to build links from authoritative websites, it’s also important to ensure that your backlink profile is clean of toxic domains. “Toxic backlinks” from websites with low domain authority can harm your website’s reputation with spammy traffic. These links should be removed or disavowed to ensure your backlink profile is a strong ranking signal to search engines.
5. What is metadata?
Optimized metadata is one of the most fundamental aspects of any website’s SEO. Commonly referring to the “page title” and “meta description,” metadata directly impacts how your website appears in organic search results. It allows for the targeting of relevant, high-volume keywords that reflect what users are actually searching for.
The right metadata for the pages on your website is a major ranking signal to search engines, and can directly improve organic click-through rate.
Ready to increase your website’s visibility (and get rolling on more sales)? Our SEO experts will help you make it happen. Feel free to reach out to us! We can’t wait to get started.
