You’re on ‘Family Feud’ and the host says, “Name something website owners use to get noticed on search engines”. What would you say? Number 1 answer on the board…survey says: “SEO services”!

Okay, enough playing around. SEO (search engine optimization) is not like the ABCs, there is a real science to it – maybe not rocket science, but SEO requires a ton of research, “systematic knowledge and experimentation…” (thanks, Dictionary.com). SEO is you making changes to your website structure and content to help it rank higher on search engines. When you optimize your website using SEO services, you increase visibility through organic (unpaid) search engine results.

Whether starting with a new site or looking for more visitors, if you know little about SEO you’ve got a learning curve. Sure, there are apps to fill in SEO gaps, but if you want real results, you’ll educate yourself and do things manually, or enlist a SEO services professional. Who wants to wait for a couple of months or longer, right?

What SEO tools should I use?

SEO tools are used to optimize your website to be noticed and ranked by search engines. If you fly solo, you’ll need to learn the tools you’ll need in your SEO toolkit. A good place to start is by searching Google for some of the best SEO tools currently available. For example, here is an article we found searching for “seo tools”, which has a great overview of some of the best tools you can use to achieve your SEO goals. Don’t be surprised that some of them are by paid subscription – these are useful tools. But many of them are free, so bonus! And here is a piece on some of the best SEO Companies in Canada (Content Kings is there!).

If you enlist a SEO expert, they have the tools and tricks that come with experience and success. Generally you won’t pay for tools if you hire an expert, you’ll be paying for the service. Experts know all about keyword research, and they know how to make your content visible to search engines. It is quite a science. So if you are just starting out and can make the investment, we recommend hiring experts to help.

Take note, however, SEO is an ongoing effort, not a set-it-and-forget-it effort. If you want visibility and rank on search engine results settle in for monthly costs!

How do I optimize my website?

No sugar coating here. It’s mostly about the quality content. If your content is not valuable to anyone, you simply won’t rank, because Google is smart and will notice! Again, that’s where Content Kings shines! We recommend the following:

Analyze, Conduct, Produce

Analyze your website data – use platforms like Google Search Console and analytics to learn where your current traffic is coming from, what terms people are using to get to your website, and look for patterns to help you understand your visitor’s behavior. Analytics play a huge part in improving SEO. Luckily, there are a ton of websites you can use to analyze your site and glean data from to help you learn more about where your website traffic is coming from and going to. This helps you make informed decisions about the content you should promote and what your visitors are spending their time looking at on your site.

Conduct thorough keyword research – this one takes practice and more practice. These days long-tail keywords are popular, not single keywords. There are a ton of tools available, use Google to your advantage. Check out tools, like Ubersuggest, that help you find keywords, gain insight into the keywords your competitors are using, and track and improve your rankings.

Produce long and valuable content – did you know your blog posts or articles should be at least 1600 words long? (this one is exactly 1678, says Google Docs word count checker). Bigger is better for Google. But you must have quality content as well. If your page visitors are staying and reading to the end, you are more likely to rank higher. If your visits have a high bounce rate (people leaving shortly after visiting the page), the page won’t be very popular to search engines. Content truly is King!

Optimize on and off

Optimize for on-page SEO – this is about optimizing specific pages on your website when you are building them. Meta descriptions, URL slugs and headlines are in this category. Use your keywords in all of the above. There are rules to live by here…like don’t overdue the number of keywords in your copy. Use keywords as closely to the beginning of headlines as possible, and so on. One of the best SEO tools for WordPress is Yoast SEO, which offers paid and premium installations.

Optimize for off-page SEO – this is about optimizing your website OFF your website; that is, using external sources. The biggest way to optimize externally is through backlinks. A backlink is simply a link back to your site from another website. And the higher that website ranks, the better quality the backlink you have. For example, I mentioned Ubersuggest above and included their URL – that is a backlink for them. There are other ways to optimize your website externally…think guest blogging, using social media to point back to your content, people mentioning your brand online, etc. This all takes a great deal of time, but it’s worth it – the more quality backlinks you have and the more authority your domain has, the higher your keywords will rank.

Go mobile and speed it up!

Optimize your website for mobile – it’s no secret mobile devices have surpassed desktop devices as the number one tool to browse and search the Internet. People are communicating on the Internet more on their mobiles, they are looking for products and services more on mobiles, and they are purchasing products by the billions every day on mobile devices. This is why Google has created the mobile-first index, which means they predominantly use the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking. You need to make sure your content is responsive, or easily viewed on a mobile phone as well as desktop. WordPress works well with themes that have responsive design built in.

Speed up your pages – Google and other search engines are pushing slow websites down in search results. It’s like a penalty. But all you did was build your WordPress site and why is that a penalty, right? Fortunately there are many ways to speed up your website. Like most things already mentioned, it takes time to do this, but the rewards mean higher rankings. If you can get your site to load even 1 second faster, it will rank higher in search results. HubSpot has a great list of things to do to speed up your WordPress site. If you are not using WordPress—you should be—but some of the items on the list can apply to any website builder or CMS (Content Management System).

How can I test my site for SEO performance?

You don’t just ‘set’ SEO and wish it well. To achieve optimal search results you’ll need to continually water your SEO flower, prune it back, feed it proper food, add daily sunlight and keep the bugs away until you have your award winning flower. When you have that, you need to keep it in the winning category. You must work on SEO services on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. It’s like the water for your flower, without it, the flower weakens and eventually goes unnoticed. Someone else’s flower will look better, and may not even have what your flower had before! But it’s still getting all the oohs and aahs.

With all that flowery lingo aside, how do you actually test your site? You turn to Google. You search for “sites to test seo performance” for starters. The first page of results will keep you reading for days. There are a ton of sites available to analyze your site quickly, show you what is working and, most importantly, what isn’t. Then you get to work fixing or improving everything these tools recommend to make your site faster, more visible, award winning. Many of these will show you only a portion of the things you need to improve, and you need to pay to see the entire results, but if you’re serious about getting noticed, they are worth every penny.

SEO Test Resources

One website we recommend is ahrefs. There are many available, but ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO services toolbox and resource-rich site you can use to rank higher and get more traffic. Look in the website’s footer and you’ll see a list of free SEO tools to start with. And whether you are a small business or a large agency or enterprise (and everything in between), they offer premium monthly or annual plans. If you pay yearly you shave off 2 months of payments. On the Lite plan, for example, you would save about $200 if you purchased the annual plan. What would you do with an extra $200? Pay for your domain hosting? Get a few tanks of gasoline for your vehicle?

Another way to test for SEO performance is checking your ranking in Google after you implement all of the above. As someone once said, “If you build it, they will come.” Truer words have never been spoken. Good luck, and contact us if you need SEO services or consultation. Remember, Content is King. It’s the key to ranking higher!