Substance and Style

    Eight Things Impacting Your SEO Efforts

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    1. Content. The most important factor to how high you rank on the SERPs is the quality of your content. It must be valuable and regularly updated if you expect to rank high. Quality matters more than quantity, but both play a role. If you’re having trouble scaling your content, try creating in batches, repurposing long form content, or delegating/outsourcing some of the production.
    2. Responsiveness. Unresponsive sites are a personal pet peeve of mine, so if you read this blog often, you’ve probably heard me say this before. Over half the traffic on the internet is now mobile. Your unresponsive site is a hassle to everyone, and google knows it. If you don’t care about alienating half of the people who visit your site, you should at least care that the algorithms are penalizing you for it more and more often. You seriously can’t afford to have a site that’s not optimized for mobile.
    3. Keywords. Writing content that naturally includes your keywords (without doing the dreaded keyword stuffing) is at least as important as ever. As search engines evolve and become better at understanding user intent, you should be learning the same thing and using that knowledge to create better long tail keywords. Answer the Public is a great place to see what people are asking about your areas of expertise (it’s pricy, but you can make three free searches a day). Apart from focusing on user intent, it’s important to regularly research and update your keywords according to changes in your market and your target audience.
    4. Structure. Is your site easy to crawl? Bots don’t want to waste time sorting out any convoluted mazes to get to important content (and, FYI, neither do people). Your site needs to have a clear hierarchy that makes sense. The internal links should work, the navigation should be fairly intuitive, and the most important content on your site should never be more than three clicks from Home.
    5. Geography. If you aren’t taking advantage of local SEO, you’re missing out on traffic. Even if your business or organization is not brick and mortar and doesn’t depend on proximity to clients, customers, or donors, you still want to come up when someone adds “near me” to their search. Start by creating a Google My Business account and completely filling out your profile information. Make sure you seek reviews and add social posts on your account.
    6. Referrals. Make sure you’re getting traffic from sources other than search, like social media and email marketing campaigns. It’s even a good idea to promote your site in the real world to boost interest and interaction. Because SEO can take a long time, these efforts can bring in traffic early on and make you seem more trustworthy in the eyes of the web crawlers.
    7. Speed. We have become a truly impatient society, and google knows it. It will penalize you for pages that take a long time to load. Optimize those photos. Limit redirects. Think twice before you put 5 pop ups on your page. You really have to think about what you would be willing to wait for and don’t push your users beyond that. NB: Please remember if you visit your site all the time and update it yourself, the amount of time it takes to load for you is not the amount of time it takes to load for other people. Check on another computer or device, or get a report on your site’s speed from your host.
    8. Credibility. Search engines want to know you’re a credible source and a good fit for their customers (the people searching). Posting social proof / reviews and your credentials is a good starting place, but you also need backlinks. To start getting them, publish comprehensive guides to important topics and promote that content, publish content that answers questions, and publish content in a variety of formats. Ask for links, especially on resources pages. Consider becoming a source for reporters at sites like helpareporter.com.