There is no single magic bullet for instant SEO (search engine optimization) or SERPs (search engine ranking position), and you should steer clear of any agency or company that says they have one. It takes continued research, adjustments, and report checking. Think of your site’s ranking as a flower that must be regularly watered, fed, and nurtured.

1. Analyze – Tools That Help You Develop Your Keyphrase Strategy

Prior to doing any work toward boosting SEO, you should use an SEO monitoring tool like Moz (Link: https://moz.com) or Ubersuggest (Link: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/). These tools will help you define your SEO strategy with key reports, like monthly search volume. Monthly search volume is the number of times a given keyphrase was searched in your defined region, country, or globally. Most of them also provide a competition score for your targeted keyphrases. Competition scores are the difficulty level of ranking your site for a given keyphrase. These insights will help you determine which keyphrases you should target. Typically, as search volume increases, so does the competition score.

Not only are these tools useful in initially defining your target list, but they also give reports on your current standings against your list post-launch.

2. Focus – Don’t overlook low search volume keyphrases and long-tail keyphrases

You will have better results in your SEO campaign and better conversion rates if your SEO efforts aren’t too broad. For example, your client makes bases for commercial tables. When you pull your initial report, they will probably throw in the keyphrase “table legs” with a monthly search volume of 10,000+. While this may make your eyes light up with dollar signs, it isn’t where you should spend your efforts. Very broad terms like this will bring users who are looking for table legs for their coffee table, chairs, and yes, maybe their dining table. Remember, this was a commercial grade table base so most of these users will see the offerings and price, and immediately bounce, dropping your conversion scores and increasing bounce rates. In this scenario, better keyphrases would be “table bases for restaurants”, “restaurant tables”, or “commercial table bases”

3. Feel the need for speed

Site speed plays a large role in your overall SEO rankings. It’s so important that Shopify makes it a part of the dashboard. You may be inclined to use large full-screen images, background images in parallaxing sections, and multiple non-system base installed fonts, and while these may make for a robust-looking site, these can all adversely affect site speed. Also, you’ve probably heard utilizing video is the best thing for lifting engagement and conversions, which is true, but you should let streaming services like YouTube and Vimeo do the heavy lifting of video playback. Self-hosted videos can bring site speed to a crawl.

Choosing a good host also plays a significant role in site speed. When evaluating hosts for your website, it’s good practice to do a little research prior to deciding. If you are using a popular CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, Magento, etc., you should look for a host who specializes in these platforms. Not only will the site be more performant, but the support staff is typically more helpful and knowledgeable.

Not only does a slow site negatively impact SEO rankings, but it also will hinder conversions as users will get frustrated, or worse, lose confidence and never return. There are a number of online tools which will report your site’s speed score.

4. Check all the basic boxes

When building a new site, you should always perform the basics of good SEO practice prior to launch. This will give you the best fertile ground to grow your rankings.

• Page Titles – All page titles should be unique and describe the page. Avoid repeating the same title on any page. Title length should be 50–60 characters.
• Meta Descriptions – Again, descriptions should be unique and describe the page. Think of Meta Descriptions as ad copy which should make users want to click. Avoid repeating the same description on any page. Length should be between 50–160 characters.
• Image Alt Tags – Alt tags not only play a large role for the visually impaired, but search engines also use them to help properly rank your site
• URL Structure – Keep your URL structure clean and easy to read. Better yet, use a keyphrase you’re targeting in the URL.
• Links – Regularly use links which coincides with your subject matter and keyphrase targets. Make sure the site you are linking to is a quality site with good SEO standings.
• File names – When you are naming your files for website use, you should be mindful of your SEO strategy and use a keyphrase where it fits. Think it’s not that important? Have you ever used Google’s image search? Their algorithm uses page content, alt tag and file name to pull relevant images.

BONUS – A few key don’ts

Don’t keyword stuff. You may have always heard more is always better, but not in SEO. If you use any of the above-mentioned methods to stuff in multiple keyphrases, this is one of the quickest ways to negatively impact SERPs.

Don’t write spammy page titles or descriptions. Today’s online users are savvier than ever and will be turned off by any spammy content. Plus, search engines don’t like it either.

Don’t use double quotes (“) in meta descriptions. Many search engines truncate after the first instance of a double quote. Keep everything alphanumeric.

Don’t use IDs or variables in your URL structure, when possible. Keep everything as human-readable as possible.

Don’t use link farms – Backlinks can tremendously boost SERPs, but they must be of quality sites. There are several companies offering the purchase of backlinks and while it may work for a week or two, one day you will pull a report only to discover your site has substantially fallen in rankings or worse completely deindexed. We call this “black hat” SEO. There are several other black hat methods for achieving quick rankings overnight, all of which you should avoid. Do hire an agency that only uses “white hat” SEO methods for proven and sustainable results.

Do you find this all a little overwhelming? Not to worry, we are here to help! Reach out and discover how Creative Energy can get you ranked.