If your company has a longer sales cycle or features a higher priced product or service, then your website plays a much more important factor in your lead nurturing process. A naturally longer sales cycle needs a SEO-optimized website to help generate sales inquiries. Building your website with proper SEO techniques in mind will ultimately help attract visitors for years to come.
The Nuts and Bolts of Designing a SEO Friendly Website
The most important thing you can do for your website’s SEO is to make sure it looks good on both desktop and mobile devices. Toward this end, you should use responsive web design if you want your website to be a lead generation machine. Google has said that responsive websites have search engine priority. Google wants to serve the best website experience that its searchers can possibly have. Responsive websites display optimally on all devices, which means they give the best user experience for all visitors. Since Google wants to serve their visitors the best user experience possible, it makes sense that you should make your website design responsive to conform to Google’s expectations. Some businesses might be tempted to use two websites, a mobile website as well as a separate desktop version. The problem with that from an SEO standpoint is that there would be duplicate content on the mobile version. This is a poor outcome if you’re concerned with SEO as you’re forcing Google to choose between two versions of your site.
One of the greatest benefits of using responsive design is that it enhances the user experience. An improved user experience typically lowers your website bounce rate. Because your website displays better on mobile devices like a tablet or smartphone, they will likely browse around longer. Compare that to someone trying to navigate a non-responsive website on their smartphone. They have to zoom in and zoom out just to read your website content, which will ultimately lead to a higher bounce rate. Google uses bounce rate to gauge if a website is relevant to a keyword search or not. Having a high bounce rate will make Google think that a website is not relevant to a search query. If it sees a high bounce rate, the Google Bot might drop your site’s rankings. You should also pay attention to your site structure to make it easy for Google to crawl and index your content. If your site is difficult to crawl, then look into upgrading your VPS hosting so that pages are served up quicker.
Build Your SEO Website Strategy Around Keywords
The goal of search engine optimization is primarily to generate traffic from organic results on the search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo searchers click on the organic results in the search listings much more often than the paid ads. Knowing that there’s plenty of free search engine traffic available for your company, it’s time to get your website optimized for SEO. One of the best places to start is planning your keyword strategy.
Your first step is to come up with a wish list of keyword phrases that you think your ideal customer is searching for. Try to think up some terms that your potential customers will be using to find your product or service. You can use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner to determine how many times a particular keyword is being searched for. You don’t want to pick any keywords if there’s no search traffic for them. You can also rise in the rankings quicker if the competition is not that high for a particular keyword. Let’s say that you’re a VPS hosting company. Even though a search term like ‘VPS hosting’ has a high search frequency, it might be too difficult to rank for. You might look into related keyword terms such as ‘minecraft hosting’ or ‘cloud cpanel vps’ for keywords that are easier to rank for. It’s a good idea to come up with 25 or more keywords to start your SEO strategy.
Placing Keywords Around Your Website
You’ll want to take those keyword phrases and spread them out through your website. You should integrate your keyword phrases into four different areas:
- The page title.
- Your website page copy.
- Header tags in your website content (H1, H2 and H3).
- The URL structure.
You want to make sure that those four top priorities are always taken care of as you keep adding keyword-rich content to your website. This will be the centerpiece of your website SEO strategy going forward. Your blog (or news / updates section) is a great place to put this keyword-focused website SEO strategy into practice. Keep adding keyword rich content that’s relevant and helpful to your target market by blogging throughout the month. All that new content gives Google something to crawl and index your website in reference to its keyword phrases. It can help to set up an editorial calendar where you plan your keyword topics that you want to write posts about. This will form the backbone of your ongoing SEO content marketing plan. As you execute your keyword blogging plan, keep your focus on the four components of on-page SEO mentioned earlier, from sprinkling your keyword into your website copy to making sure that the URL structure also reflects your keyword.
Many websites attract the majority of their traffic through organic search. And organic search is the type of traffic that converts better than referral traffic or paid traffic. It’s always better when users find you through organic search rather than you chasing after them through paid search. They consume your content and will contact you when you’ve gained their trust through the quality of your website. The traffic coming from organic search is also where you’ll be getting the highest quality leads, which is why having your website SEO-optimized for inbound content marketing becomes so important for companies looking for more customers.
