Is SEO Important for Your Website? 6 Ranking Factors That Accelerate Conversions

As business professionals and consumers, we’re always told to ‘just Google it.’ In fact, 93% of online interactions begin with a search engine. Whether we need a quick answer, a last-minute recipe, to see customer reviews for the latest kitchen gadget, or make a fast purchase, we turn to Google searches or ask voice search assistants like Siri or Alexa (which also pull data from search engines). Despite the prominence of organic search, search engine optimization (SEO) is often pinned as a backburner task.

Addressing the topic of SEO within your business can make for a difficult conversation. SEO strategies are labeled as complex, time-consuming and sometimes take even longer to see results. These assumptions lead many businesses to believe that adopting an SEO strategy isn’t worth the investment – and just like that, growth opportunities are missed.

Just like any other marketing strategy, research and experimentation are integral – and the results can be game-changing. On average, 14.6% of website visitors originating from search engines end up converting, while just 1.7% of conversions come from outbound strategies like cold calling or e-blast sends. No matter what industry you’re in, SEO can make a major impact on your bottom line. Read on to find out what SEO means and the most important SEO ranking factors that should be prioritized when getting started – especially under a restricted budget and with minimal resources.

What Is SEO and How Does It Work?

SEO is the process of implementing on-page, off-page, and technical strategies that improve a website’s overall authority (AKA power over search engines), keyword rankings, and organic traffic, aiding website engagement and conversions – depending on what the goals look like for that particular site.

Spiders, also referred to as robots or crawlers, crawl (scan) all pages on a site and check for a multitude of factors that impact on-page user experience, page speed, authority, content quality and relevance, and beyond. These results determine where and how your site will rank on the search engine results page (SERP). Will it appear as a featured snippet? A knowledge panel on the side of the results? Or will it appear as the standard blue text result?

The Most Important SEO Factors to Higher Conversions:

  1. Page Load Time
  2. Site Security
  3. Competitive Keyword Research & Selection
  4. Content Quality
  5. SEO Tags
  6. Backlinks

#1: Page Load Time

Why It Matters: No one likes a slow website, and neither do spiders. Conversion rates fall by 12% for every extra second it takes your site to load. And just like that, growth opportunities are missed. Not only is page speed crucial to your ability to rank on search engines in the first place, but also the ability to keep users on and engaged with your site no matter where they came from.

How to Address It: Testing site speed is one of the easiest SEO factors to manage without a fancy, pricey tool. You can:

  • Test it manually (on desktop and mobile).
  • Use free tools like Google Page Speed Insights to score page load time.
  • Analyze your Google Analytics data related to time on page, bounce rate, and session duration – if bounces are extremely high and session durations are low, this could be an indicator of poor load speed.

If your page load times are not up to par, there are a few basic troubleshooting tricks you can follow to start:

  • Reduce image and video file sizes.
  • Remove extra and unnecessary HTML code or JavaScript.
  • Minify JavaScript or CSS files if possible.

Make your changes, test, and repeat.

#2: Site Security

Why It Matters: An insecure site, otherwise known as an HTTP site, is a red flag to Google and users alike. All of your site pages should be converted to HTTPS if they aren’t already. Without it, your domain loses authority and a sense of trust.

How to Address It: To move your site to HTTPS, you’ll need to:

  • Buy an SSL certificate.
  • Install the certificate on your web hosting account.
  • Update your internal links to target HTTPS versions of your URLs.
  • Create 301 redirects from old HTTP URLs to new HTTPS URLs.

#3: Competitive Keyword Research and Selection

Why It Matters: Competitive research is crucial to all angles of your marketing objectives. Your SEO strategy should target opportunity keywords relevant to your organization that also pose competitive opportunities. The goal is to soar past competitors on the SERP for search queries and keywords relevant to your business offering and win-over your prospects.

How to Address It: When deciding on focus keywords, use any free keyword gap tool (we prefer SEMrush) to see which keywords your competitors outperform you on and keywords they rank for that your company does not. When determining which keywords pose the greatest opportunities, look at:

  • Competitor position and domain score: If the competitor’s domain or authority score (typically calculated by your SEO tool) is significantly higher than yours – and they rank in the top three for the term already – it might not be worth pursuing.
  • Search volume: How many users search for this keyword or phrase per month? Target a variety of high and low volume keywords. (Hint: Lower volume keywords have fewer searches per month, but tend to drive a higher ROI.)
  • Keyword difficulty: Based on the domain scores of pages that already rank for the keyword, how difficult will it be to rank? SEO tools usually display this as a percentage. The higher this number, the more difficult ranking will be. (Hint: If competitors have more traction online than your brand, begin with lower-difficulty keywords.)
  • Intent: What is the purpose of a user’s search for a specified keyword? Is it to evaluate a product by looking at reviews? Make an immediate purchase? Get information about a company’s corporate responsibility policy? (Hint: Group intent into three buckets – informational, navigational and transactional.)

If you want to search for specific topics unique to your business that competitors may not rank for, try using Google Trends to see search volume in real-time.

Once you identify your opportunity keywords, use intent to steer your next steps. You may decide to create a new informational website page, a how-to article, make structural changes to an existing page, or re-optimize an existing blog post for that particular keyword. An SEO-friendly content strategy should target a balance of creativity and uniqueness with formatting of other top-performing content.

#4: Content Quality

Why It Matters: “Content is king” is an overused statement for a reason. When Google determines search engine rankings, it takes a humanlike approach to analyze the depth, uniqueness and flow of a page in comparison to other pages on a topic. Your content should stand out while remaining relevant and staying aligned with the intent behind the user’s search query. This will help your page rank, while also improving consumer relationships with your brand.

How to Address It: When generating content ideas for your site, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Is this topic relevant to my target audience?
  • Does this content provide new and meaningful information compared to other sites that rank for keywords related to this topic?
  • Is the format clean and navigable?
  • Does this content include multimedia, such as videos, images, podcast embeds, or other interactive assets?
  • What is the next step after a user engages with this content? (Hint: Think about your site’s conversion goals and the marketing funnel.)

While selecting a target keyword in step number three is crucial and should guide your content creation decisions, always prioritize describing exactly what your content entails over identical use of the keyword. Google is smart enough to understand synonyms and descriptive sentences and will prioritize this over awkward over-stuffing of your exact keyword.

#5: SEO Tags: Titles, Meta Descriptions and Alt Text

Why It Matters: Not only do SEO tags play into where your site pages rank on the SERP, your title and meta description are also the ultimate deciding factor of whether or not someone will click through from Google to your page. Optimizing your titles, meta descriptions, slugs, and image alt text for your target and relevant keywords is an easy way to show Google and users what your page is about.

How to Address It: Using your target keywords selected from your competitive keyword research, create a spreadsheet including all of your site’s pages, URLs, current titles and current metas (if they exist). Add columns for target keywords, related keywords, slug, new titles and new metas. Follow these general rules-of-thumb when writing out your new tags:

  • Keep SEO titles between 50-55 characters.
  • Keep SEO meta descriptions between 140-160 characters.
  • Your target keyword (or synonym) should be used towards the beginning of your title and meta description when possible.
  • Slugs should include the target keyword or synonym and be between two to six words if possible.
  • Avoid including ‘stop’ words in your slug, such as but, of, the, a, etc., unless removing it changes the meaning of the phrase.
  • Image alt text should describe what’s happening in the image while using target and related keywords where possible.

Hint: Do not use the same target keyword on more than one page. This is referred to as keyword cannibalization and can hurt your site’s ability to rank for that keyword.

Why It Matters: A website’s backlink profile (number of high-authority domains and URLs that point back to pages on your site) is one of the most important SEO performance factors on Google, yet the most difficult to control. The majority of top-ranking pages get ‘follow’ backlinks from new websites at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month.

How to Address It: Start by analyzing your current backlinks and the authority score of each. If you don’t have an SEO tool, select a free backlink checker tool from this list to get started. Most will provide a chart of your site’s backlink history, the number of backlinks to your site, and a score or rating for the backlinking domain’s overall authority over search engines.

You can’t give yourself backlinks, which makes this piece of SEO a challenge. To improve your backlink profile, start with internally linking copy on your website with your other relevant pages. You should also focus on improving media relations (guest blogging, press, etc.). Lastly, you should always send a document including brand guidelines to any businesses or organizations you partner with. Include what types of verbiage to use on articles and social media when talking about your brand online, where to tag, and where to link.

These factors are crucial to getting your SEO strategy off the ground and running. But once you check off these boxes, you’re not done. All SEO strategies require consistent analysis and re-optimization to keep up with Google’s algorithm updates, industry trends and innovations, and other factors that can lead to fluctuations in rankings.

Managing all components of SEO can get timely and pricey when handled internally. Our digital team is equipped with the expertise and advanced tools needed to refine your SEO strategy through competitive analysis, keyword research, technical auditing and troubleshooting, social and media relations, and more. Reach out to us to find out how our team can generate and implement big ideas to reach your SEO and website conversion goals while staying true to your brand.

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