A beautifully designed, shiny new website doesn’t have value unless your target audiences can find it, and to find it your website needs to be search engine optimized. The latest developments to search algorithms have changed how marketers should view a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Now more than ever, search engines look for an authority and expertise on a few key topics that your company can “own.” Keep reading to learn a few more strategies for improving your SEO in 2018 and beyond.
Expand what you already own
Does your company have a deep expertise for something specific compared to your competitors that you can expand upon? If you already have high search authority for a specific topic, you can consider expanding upon it to improve your SEO. For example, if you search Google for “granny smith apples” and find that your brand appears on the first page of search results, you already have high authority on that topic. Consider building a page on your website with nutrition information, growing information, and baking tips that are all about granny smith apples. You can use Google Search Console to find keywords that your brand is already owning, and develop content from that list of keywords.
Take ownership of what makes your brand different
If you are a grower of bananas, you’re probably thinking you should start to build a page all about your main product. But before you go bananas with content, do a quick search on Google – the word “bananas” returns 107 million results. With so many players in the space, your optimization efforts would likely go unnoticed. Instead, think about what makes your brand different. Maybe it’s a specific variety you grow, or maybe you have an interesting sustainability story unlike any other. Think about what you would search for as a consumer – a recipe for banana nut pancakes, perhaps. The more narrow your topic, the better your chances of being discovered. Once you find it, create a page all about it!
Consider when it’s time to be rich with content
Usually, a best practice for website copy is to keep it short, sweet, and to the point. But sometimes you’ll want to create a place to expand on a specific topic that makes you unique. This can manifest itself with blog posts, like a how-to article on prepping and cooking your product or a page that explains your food safety procedures. Content like this encourages visitors to stick around for longer, preventing a high bounce rate and improving search engine rankings.
Support your keywords with plenty of content
So you’ve identified a keyword you’d like to be found for – what’s next? To show search engines that you truly do have a wealth of knowledge on this topic, you’ll want to create content that supports and links to this page. For example, if you want to be found for “freezing strawberries,” you can create a page with best practices and then link to this page in the ingredients lists of your smoothie recipes. By doing so, search engines like Google will reward you for expanding your knowledge on the topic and will increase your ranking when the keyword is searched.
Search engine optimization is an ever-changing part of managing a website. As technology like Amazon Alexa’s voice search emerge, search engines must change their algorithms to respond. If you’ve noticed your organic search traffic has declined over the years, reach out to us for a website assessment! We’d love to dive in behind the scenes of your site and work with you to improve your SEO strategy.
