- On-Page Content
On-page content is exactly what it sounds like – it’s the text found on your website. This content can be in the form of homepage welcome text, an About Us page description, a company blog, product descriptions, and so forth. This text provides a great place to use the keywords that are important for your business so that the search engines can crawl and index it to determine if your website is relevant to someone’s search query. - Regularly Maintained Blog
A company’s blog is a professional resource that helps from an SEO perspective because not only does it provide rich on-page content, but it also offers fresh new content. This is important for SEO because unlike a company description page, which may not be updated very regularly, a blog provides a platform for pushing out brand new content every week, month, or even day. The search engines recognize and appreciate the newness of this content and reward the company behind it with increased relevancy to searchers’ queries. - Internal Linking
When you write content for your website or blog and include links in it that take readers to other pages or resources on your site, that’s internal linking. Linking internally to your own content helps your SEO because it enables search engines draw connections between your content and better index it. Internal linking is also great for keeping people on your website longer, which is a signal to the search engines that people find your content relevant and engaging. The longer people stay on your website and the more pages they view during their visit, the more credible your website appears. - Social Profile Integration
Having social media profiles for your business is a great way to get in front of various audiences and expand your brand awareness. It’s also a good way to get a slight SEO boost by publishing fresh industry content while interacting with followers. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, Google+ page, Pinterest page, Instagram account, or any other type of social media presence for your business, be sure to integrate that into your site so that visitors can follow you on social media. - Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s free Webmaster Tools allows you to monitor your website for any errors that can negatively affect your SEO and set preferences that can help your SEO. Webmaster Tools will alert you to site crawl errors, broken links, improper redirects and other SEO killers while also giving you’re the freedom to set preferred sitelinks and set up proper redirects to give you an edge over your competition. - Local Listing
If your business has a physical presence (storefront, office, warehouse, etc.), then it should have a local listing on Google. A local listing gives your business a chance to come up in the local search results when someone searches for the products/services that your business offers. With mobile searching becoming more and more popular every year, a local listing is more vital than ever before!
Now that you have a sense of what type of components make up a solid SEO strategy, go ahead and get optimizing! If you have any questions or need any help, contact us! We’d be happy to discuss SEO strategy with you and give you an idea of how we can improve your efforts. We provide website copywriting and ongoing blog maintenance for clients across a wide range of industries!
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!