With 51% of website traffic coming from organic search, 10% from paid search and 5% from social, it's critical to ensure you're doing all you can to bolster your website’s ranking in Google’s search engine. There are a few powerful techniques communicators can implement to elevate their brand's voice and increase website exposure organically.
1. Improve Page Speed
This might not be the first thing you think of when considering SEO, but it is one of the most important ranking factors. People won't wait for your site to load. A mobile site is almost guaranteed to lose traffic should it take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Sometimes we lose sight of what Google's end goal is as a search engine. It wants to solve users' problems as fast as possible and provide a great user experience since this is what directly influences the search engine's bottom line. If your page is ranking high, but takes 10-15 seconds to load, Google will notice. It will notice the second-ranked page takes 2-3 seconds to load and your stellar rankings will be gone.
To improve your page-load speed reduce the size of image files. In addition eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, avoid landing page redirects and leverage browser caching.
2. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions to Improve Click-Through-Rates (CTRs)
The importance of CTR is growing as a top ranking signal. Again, Google wants to provide the best user experience. Therefore, if an article ranked #1 sees a big drop in CTR and the second-ranked article experiences an increase, expect Google to re-order them.
To improve your CTR, ensure you set an optimized meta description and title for each page. The description attribute is a short, helpful summary of your page’s content. It’s a primary piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on, so having an intuitive, concise and relevant description is key. Search results limit the number of characters they display for meta descriptions. It’s considered best practice to keep them to a maximum of 300 characters.
Page titles also are critical to give searchers quick insight into the content of a search result. It’s a primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality, descriptive titles. Keep page titles to 10-70 characters.
3. Have Web Analytics in Place from Day One
You can't make informed decisions about the effectiveness of your SEO effort without having objective, raw data to support you. After defining SEO goals and making foundational optimizations to your site speed and metadata, you need to track what’s working. Google Analytics, Google Search Console and other web analytics software solutions can help track your progress and assess the value of your work.
Julien Brandt is founder/CEO of Organik SEO