You’ve heard us say it before – just because you have a website doesn’t mean you’ll get leads, clients or sales. It takes a well-made website with a healthy dose of digital marketing to get visitors – and then to turn those visitors into clients and sales.
Where do you start? With some SEO basics.
1. Start With A Well Branded, Up-to-Date Website
For 2024, stay up-to-date means big banner images, bold text, a scrolling format, videos, mobile friendliness and a site optimized for quick loading speed. A well branded website will consistently reflect a company’s identity, values, and messaging across all elements. Both of these together means including cohesive design elements like logos, color schemes, typography, and imagery, as well as a clear and consistent tone of voice in content. It effectively communicates the brand’s personality and creates a memorable experience for visitors, helping to build trust and recognition among the target audience.
2. Quality Content
Create valuable, original, and relevant content that answers user queries and includes targeted keywords naturally. While it might seem easy to head over to your AI tools and let them generate content for you – it’s important to keep your content original…quality beats quantity. Not to mention search engines know how to detect duplicate content that AI tools generated for you, and then generated for competitors looking for similar content.
3. Basic On-Page SEO
Utilize best practices like optimized title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and internal linking to help search engines understand and rank your content.
While most of these aren’t things a visitor will see on the website, they will show up in search engine listings and help search engines decide how to rank your site.
4. Fast Loading Speed
Optimize your website’s performance to ensure quick loading times, which improves user experience and search engine rankings. Limiting the use of pop-ups and third party code, while minimizing sizes of images and videos will go a long way in increasing speed.
5. Clean and Structured URLs
Use descriptive, simple URLs that reflect the content of the page and include relevant keywords. Since search engines display URLS in their results, the URL structure can impact your visibility and click-thru rates, while also clearly signaling to search engines what the page is about.
6. Avoid Duplicate Content
Using the same text on more than one page is never a good idea. You might even wonder why someone would do that, but imagine this: You sell t-shirts and have the same shirt in a different style for men, and another for women. You might describe the tshirt as “mens v-neck tshirt”. Just replacing the word mens with womens and using the same tshirt description seems logical, but search engines see this as duplicate content.
Does all this seem tricky? Because it gets way more complicated when you go beyond the basics…which is why you might consider getting expert digital marketing help. Expert Creative has you covered with the basics for any website we build, and we’ve got a team of marketing experts to take you beyond the basics and get your website in the spotlight.
