Successful SEO: Part 2
Go here to read part one in the series on successful SEO.
Getting your audience to your virtual front door – your website – is only the first part of our prescription for SEO success. Once your prospects arrive, you have a limited opportunity to make a favorable impression. Good presentation, an oft-overlooked but important component of SEO, falls into two categories: aesthetics and usability.
SITE AESTHETICS
No matter what people may say, it’s human nature to judge books, people, and brands by their “covers.” If you think of your website as the digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar business, it’s easy to see the importance of aesthetics. After all, which would you prefer to visit – a well-built, beautifully designed, neat, clean store; or a run down one?
If visitors to your site return quickly to search results without reading your content, search engines will assume that your content was not relevant or appealing. This will hurt your visibility in natural search. To increase the chances a visitor will read your content, your site must be:
Professional – Inspiring trust is especially important. Don’t let subtle cues like shoddy design raise subconscious red flags in the prospect’s mind.
Proofed – Errors in grammar, facts, or links erode the prospect’s opinion of your brand. Pay attention to details.
Inviting – A clean, uncluttered page layout welcomes visitors and encourages them to navigate deeper into the site.
Presentation – Your “presentation” includes a lot of unseen elements. Sometimes, these elements are designed to seamlessly improve the user experience; sometimes they are intended exclusively to help search engines. Either way, paying attention to these details can pay off big dividends in how users find and interact with your site.
ACTION ITEM:
Create a “report card” for your site’s aesthetic presentation. Compare your site to your competitors’ sites. What are
the respective strengths and weaknesses?
If you haven’t done formal usability studies recently, ask a small, casual group of people to “test drive” your site. Give them a few specific tasks to complete (i.e., “find the answer to this question”) and have them make note of their experience navigating through your site.
Trying to do SEO within the constraints of managerial, legal, and financial guidelines is impossible for most businesses, unless they plan to hire a team of in-house professionals. We feel your pain. The complexity and lengthiness of trying to do this on your own is going to keep you from focusing on the business itself, which is never a formula for success. Engaging a dedicated SEO partner who has experience working in this space will help alleviate the gridlock so you can put best practices into action.
Greenwich SEO helps clients to utilize complementary strategies that leverage both paid and natural search, ensuring that you are maximizing your brand’s reach. Combining the keyword, presentation, and content best practices we’ve outlined is a powerful prescription that will help you take advantage of the considerable opportunities afforded by capturing incremental traffic from
natural search. Following through on even one of the action item assignments in this article can have a big impact not only on how your audience finds you, but how they engage with your content, and – ultimately – the opinion they form about your brand.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS THIS: GREENWICH SEO DRIVES SIGNIFICANT, HIGHLY-RELEVANT TRAFFIC.
We are a leading digital marketing agency with operations in Singapore, that helps successful businesses maximize their online marketing ROI through paid search, social media strategy, search engine optimization, display media, and other related services.
Our customized SEO strategies help our clients to increase the number of ranking keywords, position listings, and overall search referrals. We enable businesses to reap the benefits of a smarter, more streamlined online marketing strategy that helps them deliver a more effective user experience.
OUR CLIENTS HAVE ALREADY SEEN IMPRESSIVE RESULTS.
Are You Ready to Do the Same?
To speak with one of our digital performance experts, contact us to learn more about smart SEO and digital marketing best practices.
