Search Engine Optimization can be a difficult Technical Element to optimize for your brand’s goals. Whether it is to increase your visibility, reach more customers in your local area, identify and reach a global audience, or just allow your friends, family, and followers to find your brand when they Google you – optimizing your SEO is likely your first step to reaching your goals.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is generally defined as the process of making your website better or somehow improved for internet search engines like Google and Bing. Ultimately, SEO helps to ensure users are able to find your organization when searching for it on popular search platforms.
There are several key elements of SEO including:
- Keyword Research & Optimization
- Content Creation & Optimization
- Technical Optimization
- Link building
Let’s break these down further.
Keywords
Keywords are the words that users input into search engines to find an organization. These can be your organization’s name, purpose, location, or even your competitors’ information! Researching the right keywords is instrumental in successfully determining an optimal keyword for your page. Choosing the right keyword starts with understanding your target audience. Understanding your target audience and what keywords they use to find your organization or your competitors can help you to optimize your keywords to capture your desired audience.
Content
Content creation seems like a no-brainer… it’s whatever content you want to put on your page, right? Well, sort of. Content of course has an effect on your brand, how users perceive your brand, and your credibility as an organization, but it can also have a huge impact on your SEO. Have you ever wondered why so many sites have a Blog section where they talk about parts of their business or organization? Search engines use the text throughout the entire page to rank your search engine results. The more your website mentions certain keywords (even in your content!), the higher your SEO rank will be.
For example, if you are a Car Wash business, then having content that mentions Car Washes, the technology used in your Car Wash like vacuums, special kinds or brands of wax & tire polishes, Rain-x, and any other keywords you have identified in your research, then the higher your SEO rank will be. So when considering what content to have on your site, I would encourage you to think more than just adding credibility to your brand, but also consider what content you can create that reinforces your SEO.
Technical Optimization
There are many technical areas of your website that affect your SEO. Characteristics like your website security, page speed, mobile friendliness, website structure, linkable assets, broken link building, and others all contribute to your site’s SEO. These are all elements we can help you with and will complete for you if you have Delta Design solutions build or update your website. Here’s a breakdown of what these items mean:
Website Security
All of our websites are configured to meet standard security criteria, like having an active and enabled SSL certificate. This reflects as using https:// instead of http://
Page Speed
SEO ranks are always higher for faster pages. This is supposed to be a reflection of how faster pages will provide a better user experience. We’ll always ensure that your pages load quickly and efficiently. There are many tools available to check your page load times to ensure your page’s SEO rank is as high as possible. There are some tools that will even check your mobile and desktop versions of your site separately.
Mobile Friendliness
Your SEO rank is evaluated based on your content performance, especially on mobile devices. Google refers to this process as mobile-first indexing. We always optimize our website designs for mobile friendliness, which warrants its own blog series. Keep an eye out for more details!
Link Building
What is Link Building? Link Building is the process of strategically increasing the number of links such as hyperlinks or backlinks that point back to a particular website. It is an essential aspect of SEO meant to improve a website’s search engine visibility. You can improve your Link Building by contributing to other website’s blogs and pointing back to your own site, requesting other sites to link back to your blog, or adding links to your social media or other sites you control that in turn link back to your site. All of these methods will increase your SEO rank, but they will be especially impactful if you ensure all sites that link back to you carry high authority and SEO ranks in their own capacity.
Why is SEO important?
Ultimately, your SEO is only important if you want to increase your visibility and site traffic. If you are building a private or personal website, then your SEO rank doesn’t matter as much. However, if you are trying to increase your visibility to bring in additional customers or users to your site, then having a high SEO rank should always be your first step. Every day, Google users conduct billions of searches for information and products. It shouldn’t be a surprise that these searches are the number one way by far new users will find your site.
To harness this traffic source’s potential, you need to appear in the top search results for your target keywords. The correlation becomes very easy to predict— the higher you rank, the more people will visit your page.
At Delta Design Solutions, we offer design experiences that fit your goals. We’ll sit down and discuss your goals for your brand and make sure that we are addressing each element. If reaching a wider audience, increasing your customer base, increasing your brand visibility, or just getting your brand out there is your goal, we will make your SEO rank a priority element in your website design.
