3 Tips to Improve Your Site’s SEO

Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is a key piece of digital marketing and is an important tactic to attract new clients. There are many aspects to implementing “good SEO” on your website and many steps that can be taken to improve your site’s standing in Google’s eyes. In this blog post, Avenue will be sharing a few brief and easy tips to apply that can make all the difference.

Providing a good user experience

Much of SEO is and has been catered to Google’s AI and how to best appeal to the search algorithm. While appealing to Google’s AI is an important piece of ranking, it’s also becoming increasingly important to take a human-first approach. Take time to consider how an actual human may interact with your site. If someone is searching for a specific topic and your site shows up as a result because of irrelevant keywords, that user will likely quickly bounce off your site. This type of interaction will send a signal to Google that the content on this page is not relevant or helpful to searchers, and in turn may negatively impact the ranking of your site.

Creating a logical site structure

Another key element that will help your organic presence, as well as the navigation of your entire site, is to ensure that your pages are organized in a logical, hierarchical manner. This ties into providing a good user experience, as keeping pages neatly organized will help users to quickly find the information they are looking for, making navigating your website much easier and more efficient. In addition to the human-first aspect, this organizational structure sends signals to Google about the most important pages on your site and can influence which content and pages will rank highest within the search engine results pages.

Targeting relevant, high-intent keywords

When completing keyword research and selecting search terms to be worked into a page’s content, it is important to think about these keywords a bit critically and consider if they are highly relevant to your website. The internet is a big place, to ensure you are reaching your appropriate audience, target terms that are specific to your business or products. For example, if you have an e-commerce site that sells candles, simply targeting the keyword “candle”--which brings up over 2 billion results on Google–is probably not going to make an impact on your organic presence.

Think about what separates your product from every other candle. How can you convey to users, and Google, what special features your candle has that are specific enough to set you apart from competitors but not too specific that there is no search volume for a given keyword? In this candle scenario, an example of a better keyword may be “custom soy candle”--this term has a large amount of search volume but proves to cut the results by over 99%, increasing the likelihood of ranking.

There are many various factors that are taken into account when it comes to how Google determines search result rankings. Taking steps to improve the aspects of the greatest impact on your site is one of the most effective ways to influence your site’s organic presence. Implementing these three tips will help build a starting point for any site.

Please note that Avenue has no affiliation with any products, services, or websites referenced in this blog post. Avenue is a digital marketing agency in Portland using business as a force for good. Our proprietary suite of paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media services help brands and businesses of all sizes grow sustainably and successfully. For more information, we invite you to visit our services page.