Easy Ways to Passively Improve Your Business’s SEO

Do you want to build your search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, but don’t know where to start? Look no further. The days of simply slapping together a website and letting viewers come to you are long gone. Now small businesses and bloggers have to consistently ensure that their website is optimized to rank high in search engines and draw in new customers. Here are a few things you can do that will help improve your business’s SEO naturally.

Don’t Change Your Domain

The worst thing you can do when trying to establish a reliable reputation online is to frequently change your URL. When you do this, any links connecting to your site around the web break. SEO builds on its own simply by existing. Any web page that is consistently interacting, producing content and engaging an audience to any degree will perform better than one that has no backlinks or traceable history.

Fix Technical Problems

Simply by updating your site to be more SEO friendly, you’ll be creating a greater opportunity to rank higher in the search results. What you put on your business’s website is only one slice of the SEO pie. You also have to ensure that the site design, server speed and accessibility features are all up to industry standards.

Some of the key areas to address are:

• Response time. How long does it take for your website to load for visitors?
• Duplicate content. If you’re posting the same type of material repeatedly, stop and delete rehashed, low-quality content.
• Broken links (internal and external)
Poor meta info and misuse of HTML canonical links

You can conduct a free SEO audit yourself or hire a professional consultant to take a look at your site and provide valuable feedback.

Repurpose Old Content

Check any content that’s over a year old and update it with more recent external links. You may also find that old blog posts or service pages are no longer accurate. Updating them will show Google that your website is still active and that you are routinely producing high-quality content for web users. When you update your old content, you should also pay close attention to your use of keywords, tags and categories. Avoid spammy keyword usage and irrelevant or redundant tagging.

Leave Links Everywhere

The more links to your site that exist online, the better. Google review links are easy to make, and you can just leave them on all your pages. You can also create links to your site by actively commenting on other websites, interacting on social media and guest posting. Acquiring backlinks is one of the most important aspects of an effective SEO campaign. Once you begin to build up a good amount of links connecting to your site, your business will begin to rank higher in Google’s algorithm. Remember to be conscious about what you engage with and the traces you create on the internet. A common misconception is that it isn’t rude to self-promote on other websites’ social media profiles. In fact, it will ultimately damage your reputation. Leaving insincere, duplicate comments and generic reviews will also do little to boost your viewership.

Redirect Through Social Media

Do not just share links to your Twitter and Facebook pages without creating original content. Your goal with social media profiles is to pique interest, spark engagement and get people to share links to your site. It’ll take more than copying and pasting a URL into the status box to make that happen. If you are a small business, focus on only one platform to start. A big mistake many companies make is reposting the same content on every social media page. A common misconception is that having a presence on every social media platform builds authority, but this is only true if you have something of quality to offer to unique viewers on each. Don’t post just for the sake of posting.

Offer Free Resources

Resources can be anything from infographics to PDFs. E-books are a common email list opt-in reward, but you should also have a handful of quality content readers can download for free from your website embedded in accompanying blog posts. When you provide resources, you show your visitors (and Google) that you are an expert in your field. Some good ideas for website freebies include:

• Checklists
• Workbooks
• Web graphics
• Helpful PDF guides

Remember to ask yourself, what problem is my audience trying to solve? Make sure that your content revolves around the answer. Offering materials that help people reach genuine solutions builds trust and gratitude. Remember to always stay customer-focused, and you’ll be able to create content and design a website that offers value to viewers. This quality is what will help you stand out from the competition and improve your SEO on your own.