Six tactics to up your website's SEO

You might have the best service in your market, but if your website doesn’t show up when potential customers are looking online, you’re missing out on sales. SEO strategies, content performance, user engagement and social media all factor into your status on the web, but a few tweaks to your online presence can make all the difference. Try these six tips to make your business searchable.

1) Answer questions and create relevant content.

Content is important now more than ever, but the key is quality content in the right context. Turn your website into a resource for your customers and let them know about your expertise in your field. This gives Google more information on connections of relevant content throughout the web and can help improve your rankings by revealing the right content to the right audience. Creating high-quality content can also earn you brand mentions. Unlinked brand mentions can be as strong a signal as backlinks.

2) Link to both inside and outside sources.

Linking internally for added value to your customers increases your user engagement, decreases your bounce rate and ups the amount of time people spend on your site, all important user-centric factors that help with your Google ranking. Link externally to related authoritative domains to give your website audience more information on the topic. When other industry authorities read and link back to your content, Google will consider your backlinks as endorsements of quality and expertise. A healthy link network is the second most important ranking factor.

3) Use descriptive URLs.

Using keywords in your URLs helps Google and other search engines understand what your content is about and include it in relevant results. Stick to five or fewer search terms in your URLs. Any more than that may look like spammy links, and work against you. You can be more detailed in the deck of the article instead, where your call-to-action should live.

4) Improve your social media.

Social media is not a direct ranking factor, but the buzz and shares from social media on a piece of content can boost your traffic and ranking on Google search. So make sure you’re sharing useful and pertinent content to your target audience on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Bonus tip: Make it visual and engaging.

5) Analyze your performance.

Sites like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you determine what type of content is most popular so that you can keep giving your customers and potential customers reasons to come to your website. If you can answer questions potential clients are asking, Google will recognize your site as a resource and feature you in search results.

6) Go mobile-first.

As more web traffic is coming from mobile devices, it’s important to make sure your site looks good, and functions, on mobile platforms. An easy way to check mobile health is to run a URL through Google’s mobile-friendly test at search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. If you know which software your website was built with, you can often find resources on that platform.

The author is an SEO specialist.