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As businesses continue to leverage digital tools and platforms to promote their products and services, search engine optimization ranks among the top means they use in drawing attention to themselves.
If you have not already taken this aspect of digital marketing seriously, you should. As you have surely heard before, 93% of online experiences start with search engines. So perhaps search engine optimization has already been a big part of your online marketing efforts.
However, you still have to stay abreast of the continually evolving practices involved in making a website rank high on search engine result pages. Only in this way will you attract more traffic to your website. That is why this article highlights the top search engine optimization strategies you need to implement in your business in 2020.
1. Create Valuable Content for Better Search Engine Optimization
Even in 2020, content is still king. Search engine users will always have questions, and it’s left to you to provide the answers through relevant content. If you can accomplish this, Google will reward you with a high rank on its result pages. However, if you can’t, your website will get lost among the multitudes. That means little or no visibility. This in turn translates into low traffic to your website, and that’s bad for business.
How then do you create content that’s valuable and relevant? Begin by staying in touch with your target audience. Discover the questions they are asking today and build your content around those questions.
Moreover, ensure that you stand out by creating unique or superior pieces of content. This way, your site will become memorable. People will be encouraged not only to come back but also to share your content on social media.
However, you should understand that answering your target audience’s questions goes beyond just whipping up blog posts on those subjects. It also boils down to using the language your target audience understands.
For instance, if you are catering to those searching for best roofing shingles online, you can start with keyword research. Then ensure that your content is correctly optimized for search engines by incorporating those keywords in your blog. That way, your intended audience will easily understand the information on your site.
2. Optimize Your Content for Voice Search
The use of voice search to make queries on search engines is becoming widespread. Therefore, it’s smart for businesses to adopt practices that will improve their website’s ranking on results pages prompted by voice search.
In optimizing your content for voice search, bear in mind that people do not typically type in the same manner in which they speak. Texts tend to be shorter than spoken words. This means you will have to incorporate specific methods designed to cater to voice queries. An example of such an approach is the use of long-tail keywords, which usually consist of a minimum of three words.
Find several long-tail keywords on a subject in your niche by conducting research. Then create content that features those keywords strategically. Now, watch your ranking on search engine result pages soar.
3. Improve User Experience on Your Website
While it’s yet to be confirmed, it is suspected that Google rewards sites that have low bounce rates. In other words, Google gives those sites higher rankings. This means that the more time users spend on your website, the more relevant Google believes your website is. Therefore, the higher your site will rank. However, the only way to get users to spend more time on your website is to improve the quality of the experience you offer them.
Improving users’ overall experience is no mean task. However, you can begin by formatting your content for easy readability. Write shorter paragraphs, and don’t be afraid to throw in one-sentence sections once in a while. Also, include subheadings. These help your readers find what they are looking for quickly.
Other things you can do with your content include writing in a conversational tone. Also, provide the more valuable bits of information at the outset, then move on to the less relevant ones. This way, you will grab your audience’s attention quickly and reduce the risk of losing them.
Apart from formatting your content for convenient readability, you can also improve your visitors’ experience by enhancing your site’s speed. A website that loads slowly will keep users waiting for the information they desperately need. And this can push them off your site.
However, you can increase your site’s loading speed by compressing images to reduce their load time. Optimize your code by removing unnecessary characters like commas and spaces. Additionally, improve server response time and take advantage of browser caching.
4. Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Many Internet users carry out their searches on their mobile devices. This is why the highest-ranking websites are optimized for mobile. One of the practices such sites make use of, and which you can also adopt, is the optimization of titles and meta descriptions.
Titles and meta descriptions are excellent ways of giving mobile users a taste of what’s in store for them on your site. They invite users to come and browse by offering short pieces of information as previews. You will also catch the attention of search engine crawlers in this way.
Additional measures for optimizing mobile visitors’ experience on your site include improving the site’s speed and ensuring your site’s design elements are responsive and adjust to fit various screen sizes. And be sure to use only mobile-friendly pop-ups.
With Google moving to a mobile-first index—a system of ranking websites using the levels of their optimization for mobiles—upgrading your site’s outlook and functionalities for mobile users is pivotal to your site’s ranking on result pages.
5. Apply Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is one influential tool for search engine optimization that few people are well conversant with. It’s the process by which search engines look for synonyms of a searcher’s keywords.
This means that while bringing up results for that search, they will show not only results for the main keywords alone but also for related terms. So if you want to make the most out of search engine optimization in 2020, you should contact an agency that is leading in this practice. One such firm is the Chicago SEO Services Hook Agency.
So how does LSI affect SEO? A website that contains not just the main keywords related to a subject, but also several synonyms or connected terms, will naturally rank higher on results pages. Let’s say you’re writing about the best running shoes, for instance. Then your LSI keywords could include “best sneakers,” “trainers,” “budget running shoes,” and other related terms.
These terms ensure you’ll cover a wide range of possible search terms users could input. By doing this, you’ll increase your website’s chances of ranking high on results pages.
Take Your Website to the Top of Google’s Search Result Pages by Optimizing Your Search Engine Practices
You can’t afford to let up on your efforts to take your business to the top in 2020. Therefore, one of the things you need to pay close attention to is how your website is doing on search results pages. You need to keep testing your strategies, measuring your results, and tweaking your practices until you find what actually works.
However, take care not to feel overwhelmed by the deluge of information on the best search engine optimization practices. Instead, implement the most important ones, such as content optimization and mobile SEO, first. From there, you can move on to the less pivotal strategies later.
