Everyone wants their business’s website to fall above the fold on a search page. But if you want a high listing and don’t want to pay to get it, only one strategy will get you there: search engine optimization. SEO best practices maximize your brand’s visibility potential, stretching your online presence to as many corners of the internet as possible. 

So what do businesses in search of optimal website results need to know? Let’s dive in.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Why do businesses need to optimize website pages for search engines? To answer that, first ask yourself where your customers go to find the information they need. 

Although more audiences are turning to social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok for certain searches, the vast majority of searches are still performed using Google or another search engine such as Microsoft Bing. When someone enters a search query and lands on a business website as a result, that business has essentially earned organic search traffic (unless the listing was paid for).

Search engines use a detailed algorithm to rank the results of a search based on keywords in the prompt. This algorithm “crawls” page content across the web, checking the content’s relevance and credibility based on a number of factors. By following best practices for SEO, you can optimize these factors on our webpages to not only rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and earn organic traffic but also reveal what audiences are searching for and through what channels. As a result, you gain more visibility across various corners of the internet, including social media and search engines.

Keyword Research and Its Impact on SEO

How can you find out what your audience is searching for? Before you can optimize for the right keywords, you have to know what they are—which requires thorough keyword research.

Your overall goal is to identify relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition. Ultimately, you’ll wind up with a list of keywords that span a range of search volumes and competition levels, and you can narrow down from there. 

But don’t limit yourself to just one keyword! Certainly, you should identify one primary keyword, but semantic and secondary keywords also help your pages to rank higher and across a wider range of topics. Also, consider identifying one or two long-tail keywords—hyper-specific phrases that your audience may be searching for verbatim, such as “how to perform keyword research” or “why do I need SEO?”

Once you’ve specified a primary keyword (plus a few semantic and secondary keywords), you can start optimizing your page content. Although you want to include your keywords wherever possible, you don’t want to overdo it by keyword stuffing. This practice is considered “black hat” SEO, which violates search engine guidelines to exploit SEO best practices. High keyword density is great for optimizing your content, but you must balance overarching SEO goals with authentic, valuable writing.

On-Page Optimization Checklist

With a list of keywords in hand, where exactly should we include them in content? Ideally, the primary keyword should be:

🔲 Scattered throughout the copy: HubSpot generally recommends a keyword density of 1-2 percent, meaning it should appear at least once in every 100 words. Semantic keywords can appear less often, but don’t forget to sprinkle them throughout your content. 

🔲 Somewhere in the page title: Placing your primary keyword in the page title tells your audience right away that the content is relevant to their search query.

🔲 In the introduction: Try to drop the keyword somewhere in the introduction, preferably in the first paragraph if possible. 

🔲 Within the URL address: This is also known as the “slug.” Your URL is an excellent and often overlooked opportunity for keyword usage. For example, you can optimize “yourcompany.com/blog/321” by changing the slug to “/seo-best-practices” so it includes your keyword and better represents the content.

🔲 In the meta description: Try to include your primary keyword in your pages’ meta descriptions, preferably toward the beginning.

🔲 Featured in at least one heading: Ideally, include the keyword in the first header that appears. When search engines crawl your pages, headings are one of the first things they look at. Keyword-dense headers help search engines confirm that the page offers information that’s relevant to the desired topic.

🔲 In image alt text, including the featured image: Keywords should appear in the alt text of images and graphics, if appropriate. You should also aim to include keywords in image file names.

🔲 Used as hyperlink text: When possible, use your keywords as anchor text for internal links and company resources. This suggests to search engines that your organization’s content is associated with that keyword. 

Key Elements of a Strong SEO Strategy

Although there’s no simple solution to creating the perfect SEO strategy, there are best practices that can be applied to some foundational elements of your pages:

Local SEO

Regardless of where your business is physically located (yes, even if it’s fully remote), local SEO considerations are essential to your ranking on SERPs. These efforts target customers in a specific area or region who are offered local search results based on their location. According to Go-Globe, 46 percent of Google searches are seeking local information, and a whopping 97 percent of users searched online to find a local business. Local SEO efforts help your business appear in queries containing the phrase “near me” and similar search prompts.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO happens more on a website’s back end. It’s the effort of improving site architecture to comply with the technical requirements set by search engines. These technical aspects include website speed optimization, mobile-friendliness, and crawlability. Developers implement technical SEO to ensure search engines are able to easily crawl, index, and understand webpage content for ranking purposes. Optimizing with technical SEO also contributes to a positive user experience (UX).

User Experience

User engagement is directly affected by UX. Your goal should be to provide a seamless, user-friendly experience for everyone who visits your page. When a website takes too long to load, for example, or you can’t read the text because it’s too small, what’s your next move? Most likely, you go somewhere else. This action is considered a “bounce.” A high bounce rate negatively impacts your SEO ranking, which is why UX considerations such as quick load times and accessibility are crucial.

Mobile Optimization

With so many searches being performed on mobile devices, mobile optimization is essential for your website and all of its associated pages. This effort ensures that the website’s content and appearance render properly on any screen size or device type, which also speaks to promoting a positive UX. Responsive design secures the integrity of your pages so they aren’t warped or misread, and page speed optimization keeps your load times low. All of this focus on facilitating a good mobile UX helps to improve search rankings.

Content Creation

Creating relevant, helpful, engaging content for your audience is an important part of SEO. One goal behind content marketing is to develop SEO-friendly content that aligns with user intent, including blog posts, e-books, guides, white papers, and social media posts. Identify the channels where your audience is spending the most time, then optimize content for those channels.

Link Building

Getting high-quality backlinks from reputable websites speaks to your credibility as a business and helps SEO efforts. Link building is a classic best practice for SEO and can be achieved through guest posting, influencer collaborations, and content promotion. To acquire backlinks, try reaching out to journalists and industry publications, or turn to social media to recruit experts and influencers.

Assessing and Maximizing Website Performance

After implementing your SEO strategy, remember to always refer back to your North Star when running attribution reports and assessing your marketing performance. Your North Star is something to follow—the metric that is your guiding light for success. The best way to determine your progress is by checking back on it frequently through in-depth data analysis and tracking.

Analytics and Tracking

Make data actionable by analyzing and tracking trends in performance. Run reports on website traffic regularly, and use those metrics to further optimize pages for better rankings. All types of businesses employ popular tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to collect and visualize SEO data. Numerous other tools monitor and improve SEO performance as well, including many that use advanced AI models for data analytics tasks. In fact, many companies today are leveraging AI to streamline data analysis along with various other optimization efforts.

Ongoing Optimization and Maintenance

Even if you achieve the highest SERP ranking for a keyword, it’s crucial to continue monitoring various rankings, analyzing competitors, and making necessary adjustments to your pages. You can go back and update old blog posts with new information, or revisit outdated pillar pages to make them more relevant to today’s audiences. Ensure developers are performing ongoing maintenance on your website to confirm suitable load speeds, mobile-friendliness, and accessibility compliance.

Implementing Best Practices for SEO

Optimizing for Google and other search engines is a constant work in progress. SEO is never set-it-and-forget-it; even maintaining your rank isn’t guaranteed. If your goal is to rank higher in SERPs, periodic performance analysis and ongoing optimization are absolutely necessary.

Search engine optimization can be a lot of work, so it helps to have a strategic marketing expert in your corner to take some of the load off. The team at SmartBug puts the web to work for you, maximizing your digital footprint with a personalized approach to SEO. 

Learn more about Sierra's partner, Smartbug Media.

Jen Spencer, CEO of SmartBug Media, has more than 20 years of marketing experience working within tech startups, publicly traded companies, mid-market organizations, and the not-for-profit space. She assists B2B organizations and B2C e-commerce businesses drive lead growth, revenue generation, and market awareness throughout the full customer lifecycle, leveraging comprehensive digital content, design, and web development solutions.