Fighting Your Corner: Assertive SEO for 2022

More and more, people are searching the internet with their voice and not their keyboards. From home assistants to voice search being readily available on any device on google, you have to optimize your content and site to be recognized by it. Voice search is optimized a little different than regular SEO, so don’t be afraid to consult or even hire an expert. It holds the potential of bringing forth a brand new, untapped, market that you simply can’t afford to ignore. As well as that, it puts you miles ahead of your competition simply because they may not have even thought of it.

Update Your Website

Design trends change every few years, and you definitely need to be there for them. Having a modern, fast, and optimized website is crucial for a positive user experience, lower bounce rates, and more revenue. What this means is that your site should be easy to navigate, load fast, and be accessible on multiple devices. Don’t include too many tabs and make your visitors work for the information they want to find. Instead, have clearly visible tabs that will take them to certain parts of the site like your services, contact information, or your blog. When it comes to speed, everything more than three seconds of loading is considered low. People don’t have the time or patience to wait, and they want immediate access to everything they need. Therefore, don’t overbear your design with complex pictures or too much text. As well as that, go for pleasant colours that don’t annoy the eyes after looking at the screen for more than two minutes. Finally, remember that you live in an age where people use mobile phones and tablets much more often than computers and laptops. If you don’t optimize your website to run on these devices, especially phones, you’ll be losing a lot of potential business.

Don’t Forget the Human Aspect

While search engines and algorithms are important for ranking content and you should tailor it to them, don’t forget to write for your audience, too. The most common mistake people make is that they write articles just for the technical aspect of SEO. You might think it’s a good idea, but the human aspect of SEO is just as valuable. Without it, content looks dry, uninteresting, and it doesn’t convey all the right information. This makes people enter and leave your website immediately, thus signalling to the search engine that something is wrong or not up to par. In turn, you get bumped down further than you already were. Keeping your audience in mind is essential, so make sure to have good and communicative writers who know how to tell a story. Not only will this keep visitors on your site longer and potentially turn them into paying customers, but it will also signal to the search engine that you have a quality article on your hands.

Make Use of Metadata

When you google things, you’ll see a chunk of text pop up below the title of your search result. This is called a meta description and it’s basically a summary of what the linked article will be about. While most people just let google fill in the meta description automatically, believing it’s not important, it can launch you higher in the search results if you pay attention to it. This is because meta descriptions are a sort of structured data that algorithms analyze and include in your SEO. So, make the description compelling and maybe even include a keyword in it. This way, you’ll be more likely to rank high. As well as that, if you keep a unique voice and include thought out meta descriptions in all your articles and social media, your content is much more likely to get pushed and categorized together.

Focus on Your Niche

One mistake people make with trying to rank high is to compete with everyone. Instead, all you need to do is focus on being the best in your own niche. In truth, it doesn’t really matter if you’re worse or better than big corporations or strong companies from other niches. They likely don’t have the same target audience, and even if they do, that audience may need your services as much as theirs. By focusing on your own niche when it comes to SEO, you eliminate the bulk of the competition. Research your field, see who your real competitors are, and come up with a better SEO tactic than them. Fight with everything you’ve got— from content to UX website design. If you know about a lot of SEO or hire someone who does, you can also pinpoint the weak spots in their tactic and improve on them on your own.

Work on Your Brand

Brands have a certain prestige to them, they command authority, and they convey trustworthiness regardless of if we’re talking about Google or potential customers. The good news is that not only big corporations can be established brands. With a little elbow grease and consistency, you too can have brand recognition that can help you rank high and bring in more revenue. You have to be diligent about this, though. First, you’ll need to come up with the core values of your company. Think about why you got into the business in the first place and about where you want to take it next. Secondly, find your voice. This step should focus on your target audience and what they respond to best. Whether it’s a casual conversation or flashy ads, you’ll know once you start interacting with your customers more often. Turn to social media to see how they interact with your business and what they post, and you’ll see what kind of voice you should have. Finally, try to be authoritative across all social media and your content. This means you should reply to people asking questions related to your industry, post relevant articles, and generally seem like you know what you’re talking about. The more people respond to your expertise, the better. Don’t forget about the logo though, as people should start associating your business with a certain unmistakable symbol. Soon enough, your business will no longer be just a small business, but a brand that Google can then rank higher simply because of its reputation.

Take Inspiration from Other Countries

We live in a highly globalized world, so you shouldn’t think you have competition only in your own country. There are businesses like yours all around the globe, and you can look at what they’re doing to see how you rank and what can be improved. Australia, for example, is one of the leading countries in the world when it comes to good SEO. This is because they work with a large market and experts in all industries. Quality SEO in Sydney or Melbourne, or even Perth is hard to achieve due to the hard competition, so whoever ranks the highest must know what they’re doing. Do a little research, visit the companies’ websites, and take notes. You don’t have to stick to just Australia, either. Take a look at any large market and apply the same practices and design to your own website. It’ll help you rank regardless of if you’re in a small or big niche. Don’t forget the good old UK, there are lots of businesses who are actively trying to rank in Google search for popular keywords with a goal to drive qualified traffic to their websites. At DCP we tend to focus on geographic keyword optimisation which in most cases is easier to rank in Google Search. For example, we rank page 1 in google for London Web Designers. This help to drive more customers to our website design company.

Improve Your Content

Any business can benefit from a blog. People want advice and opinions from experts, regardless of what niche we’re talking about. When you have content on your website and use the right keywords, you’re also far more likely to show up in search results. Think of it this way, how can people who need your services reach you when they don’t know the name of your business? his way, you’ll show up on their radar when they search for items related to your business, and you’re likely to get new customers. Even if they don’t buy anything from you, you’ll still get more traffic on your site. What this means is that your content will be recognised as higher quality than that of your competitors, thus ranking you higher, and bringing more revenue in.

Keyword Research

Probably one of the most important aspects of building a successful website is keyword research. It would make logical sense that you are optimising your website with written content that targets the right customers. Keyword research is not difficult but can be time-consuming, not to worry though, because if you are putting in the effort to do proper keyword research and then writing your content themed around those keyword phrases then you have a good chance of ranking better in Google search compared to your direct competitors. To give you a helping hand, why not take a look at my free Keyword Research Tutorial below.