We all depend on search engines. In fact, there are more than 40,000 searches per second. From site architecture to search-friendly content, here’s how to stand out.
Whether you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes, streaming music or seeking healthcare services in your community, you’re often starting with a search engine. And so are your patients, visitors, donors and other target audiences. We’re all doing it – at a rate of about 40,000 searches per second.
So how do you stand out from the pack? It’s not as difficult as you probably think.
1. Keep the clutter out with a solid site organization
Organizing your content isn’t just having a great site structure. Auditing your content regularly for ROT – redundant, outdated or trivial – will ensure your content isn’t only fresh but that it’s relevant to your audience.
While you’re auditing content, consider microsites you have or want to have in the future. For existing microsites, analyze the traffic they’re getting and the freshness of the content. Before you decide to build a microsite, consider if they’re really necessary.
Whenever you tackle site organization, ask your audience about what is valuable to them. Through great tools like online surveys or stakeholder interviews, you can learn a lot about how your audience – internal and external – is using your website.
2. Write search-friendly content
You can learn oodles from Geonetric about how to write quality content that converts, and fortunately for you, those same principles apply to search engines. Quality content matters to your users, and it matters to Google, too.
But while you’re writing great content, don’t forget to write great page titles and descriptions. Page titles and descriptions are displayed in the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. You’ve seen them plenty of times. They look like this:
Page titles (< 60 characters) are the words and phrases Google uses to index your site, while descriptions (< 155 characters) tell search users what the page is about, hopefully enticing them to click into your site. Each page title and description should be unique, just like every page of your website.
And while keyword frequency mattered much more five years ago, keyword strategy in 2015 is all about weaving keywords naturally throughout unique, user-focused content. With tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Rank Tracker or Geonetric’s SEO Retainer, you can get the most common words your users are entering to find you and your competitors.
3. Spread your links and let them fly
Getting your links out to the world doesn’t have to be done with a megaphone on a mountain, or even a billboard. If your organization uses social media, welcome to your best platform.
Take a look at Mary Greeley Medical Center, based in Ames, Iowa, which recently celebrated the eighth anniversary of its pet therapy program. Sure, cute animals on Facebook are always a win, but why stop there? They decided to link back to the page of their site that describes what the program offers, and how local Ames citizens can get involved.
Backlinking to your website helps Google see traffic coming from other channels, boosting your relevance and your ranking results.
Other ways you can backlink? Claim your listings. This includes Google, Dex, Yellowbook and any others floating out there. Google and search engines appreciate correct, consistent information so if you find a listing with your organization’s name on it, claim it, correct it, and slap that website URL on it.
Take your website marketing to the next level
From search engine optimization and user-focused content to stunning designs for a responsive, multi-screen world, Geonetric is here to help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about services that will meet and surpass your organization’s web goals.