Why do I need an SEO Audit in Columbus
Before trying to rank a website from Columbus, you will want to do a comprehensive audit. To the contrary of some common opinions, doing an audit is not necessarily the easiest thing to do.
The ease of the audit is based upon the overall size of a website. Nonetheless, doing an audit will assist in prioritizing actions and addressing underlying problems faced by each unique website.
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The following topics will be addressed in this article about future-proofing your SEO actions:
- Enhancing Titles and Headings
- Prioritizing Website Navigation Pages
- Including Webpage Breadcrumbs
- Tracking a Website’s User Activities
- Adding an SSL Certificate
- Claiming Available Google Maps Listings
- Optimizing Site Images
- Boosting Website Speed
- Interlinking a Website’s Pages
- Linking-Out to Authority Sites
- Protecting Social Media Profiles
- Increasing Social Sharing
- Sharing Other Site’s Relevant Content
- Receiving Positive Reviews
- Making a Unique 404 Page
- Consistently Posting High Quality Content
- Updating Existing Content
- Re-purposing Old Website Content
- Making a Site Mobile Friendly
- Nofollow backlink Ads
- Hacking the Competition’s Backlinks
- Artificial Traffic Manipulation
1. Enhancing Titles and Headings
One of the most common and critical mistakes we see with new clients from Columbus is that they paid a web designer or SEO company in Columbus a significant amount of money and still lacked basic on-page optimization that is dependent upon keyword research and title/header optimization.
It is crucial to ensure that web pages target the correct keyword phrases. The title tag has a significant amount of importance in SEO, so be sure to include the relevant and targeted keyword phrase. The closer the most essential keyword phrase is to the beginning of the title phrase, the better.
After that, the correct keyword phrases are needed in the H1-H3 page headings. The H1 heading is the most crucial header so it should be the very first header on a web page. In many cases, it’s the same as the title, however it does not necessarily need to be the exact same.
The title is the most important SEO tag. If you have a Google AdWords or Facebook pay-per-click campaign active, it might be a good idea to borrow from those titles. Some SEO experts have the opinion that PPC titles are not effective for SEO purpose, however the reality is that PPC titles are optimized for conversions and this ultimately benefits SEO efforts.
Enhancing meta descriptions to convince people to click a page’s link in the search results means that the title must have a call to action and use a relevant keyword phrase.
Make sure the appropriate keywords are found there, otherwise the possibilities of the web page ranking well greatly diminish.
An optimized page can target multiple keywords in Columbus and this is helpful because it can address various related and relevant keyword phrases and topics on one page with longer content.
2. Prioritizing Website Navigation Pages
Navigation can be considered one the most important structure factors on a website. It is one of the first things that links a website’s pages together and it is often found at the top of each page. This positioning gives the navigation links a lot of power.
The web pages optimized for the most important keywords are typically linked to directly from a site’s navigation menu. The navigation menu links are usually placed on every single page on a website and this makes those pages appear to be very important in Google’s algorithms.
A website’s navigation structure is extremely important for SEO in Columbus and as the top of the hierarchy page, a site’s homepage usually has the highest authority on all sites is because every other page links up to it via a logo or hypertext link.
3. Including Webpage Breadcrumbs
Adding site-wide breadcrumbs can be very beneficial to a website from Columbus (especially for eCommerce sites with numerous products and categories). Website breadcrumbs a structure within a site and make it easier to navigate.
Nearly all online stores link to product pages from category pages. By doing so, category pages add some additional value to the sub-listed product pages and helps to boost their authority within a specific niche.
However, most sites are designed so that category pages (e.g., “touch screen monitors”) are intended to rank higher than product pages (e.g., “15 inch touch screen monitor”) since the category page is optimized for the more general keyword phrase with higher traffic from Columbus. Breadcrumbs can be utilized to consolidate the strength of a category pages by linking up to them with all the subcategory and related product pages.
4. Tracking a Website’s User Activities
Tracking is extremely important to monitor website visitor activities and understanding what content draws a person from Columbus to a website. If rankings and traffic behavior is not tracked and analyzed, it is impossible to detect the issues a website in Columbus might have.
One of the first factors to identify is what pages do the site users tend to leave very quickly. This bounce rate affects the value your website has in Google algorithms. If the search volume for a keyword phrase is high, but website visitors are quickly leaving a page, then this suggests that they are not finding relevant information.
If organic search traffic is not monitored in terms of search result rank and site visits, then it makes it difficult to know if your SEO strategies are making a difference. The Google Search Console and Google Analytics are the first suggestion (and free to use) to monitor a website’s organic search traffic and website issues.
Once you can verify that people are visiting a website in Columbus , then heatmap tracking software can be used to better identify what website users are doing on a site. From this point forward, it is possible to make changes to the page content based upon where people seem to be looking and at what point on the page they are losing interest.
5. Adding an SSL Certificate
Since 2014, Google has indicated that Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) has become a ranking factor. SSL is an extra degree of protection for website users and an additional cost for people seeking to malevolently use a site. The more protection that can be offered to a website’s visitors, the more likely they are to trust the site as an authority.
Installing an SSL certificate is not complicated and in most cases, a hosting provider in Columbus should be able to take care of it in a few minutes.
6. Claiming Available Google Maps Listings in Columbus
Setting up a Google My Business account in Columbus is a way to get a website listed multiple times in Google search results and displayed in the local Google Maps. This also links back to a website and offers the opportunity to display optimized content on the Google Maps listing.
After a Google My Business account is created and the details properly filled out, the account can be optimized with content and images that link back to pages on the target website. This independent listing helps to build trust with future website visitors from Columbus and gives them a third-party option to review your business.
7. Optimizing Site Images
Website images can take up a significant amount of space on a server and this means that this takes additional time to load. When a website loads slowly, this will negatively affect conversion rates and by compressing, optimizing and reducing image sizes it is possible to speed up a page’s load time.
8. Boosting a Site’s Speed
Even though a website’s images can have the biggest speed impact, there are other factors that hinder a website from loading quickly. These can be code compression, PHP conflicts, bloated databases, site redirects, and more. If a website is using WordPress, one option that tends to help load times is to reduce the use of plugins.
Some sites are being built in very minimalist ways in order to make them load as quickly as possible. Sliders are not very effective and many developers of SEO optimized sites are starting to leave them out.
The quality of a server and hosting company in Columbus are also critical components. In that market, a person pretty much gets what they pay for and often it is worthwhile investing in a managed hosting solution so that there are technicians who can troubleshoot server settings and provide support.
Websites such as GTMetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insights can help to analyze site and server conflicts. The ideal website/server response time is under 3 seconds and closer to a 2 second load time if possible.
Caching and file minification should be used on a site in order to ensure that files that can be stored on a user’s computer are stored and that other code is as optimized and compressed as possible.
9. Interlinking a Website’s Pages
Interlinking is an extremely effective SEO strategy in Columbus . Important pages can be linked within a website through the use of specific hyperlink keyword text.
This strategy typically has less risk associated with it than creating external backlinks using keyword links.
When adding new content to a website it is important to link to other pages that are relevant to the original article’s topic. These internal links connect the web pages and also help Google to understand the context of the site.
10. Linking-Out to Authority Sites in Columbus
Everyone would rather have authority websites in Columbus linking to their website, but it doesn’t always happen that way initially and linking-out to authority websites is actually a very natural process. The entire basis of social media sharing is founded upon sharing websites and online content on personal and public pages.
Linking-out sends the signal to Google that one website recognizes the authority of another site over their own authority. This makes the original site appear authenticate.
11. Protecting Social Media Profiles
Social media platforms evolve over time. Initially it was MySpace, now it is Facebook, but Instagram appears to be growing stronger. Who knows what social media platform will suddenly gather attention and popularity tomorrow.
The point is that an authority website in Columbus will have a number of social media accounts that are relevant to its target audience and the best media to represent its content.
Often, social media accounts use URL that can be personalized. In this case, it is important to reserve your brand, product, or niche keywords on a social media platform. In this world it is first come-first serve.
12. Increasing Social Sharing in Columbus
Want your content to go viral?
Then you need it to be shared on social media platforms in Columbus . To be shared, it needs to be: informative, exciting, unique, impressive, different, or appealing. If you don’t facilitate the sharing process on your website using social links, then it probably will not happen.
The best way to resolve this is to add social share and social like buttons on website pages.
A common SEO strategy is using locked content that someone has to share on social media in order to access. This can be a double-edged sword since the content being shared must have a perceived value that outweighs the potential negative feedback on social media if it is not well-received.
13. Sharing Other Site’s Relevant Content
As the old saying goes, “one hand washes the other…” You will need to share interesting and relevant content from other sites. Digital marketing is pretty reciprocal. If you want your content shared on social media, then first you will need to share other’s content.
Besides trying to get your content shared on social media, it is a good idea to get them shared on personal blog or website in Columbus . This is because social media profiles are usually not indexed so even if they share a link to your website it won’t be indexed and Google won’t count the backlink.
14. Receiving Positive Reviews
Once a Google My Business account is live, it is a good idea to get some positive reviews from people around Columbus. They do not necessarily need to be from customers – even friends, families, and employees in Columbus will do if they leave some general, positive comments about the quality of people in the organization.
Positive reviews are a local SEO factor, but will help with click through rates and perceived authority.
Positive reviews on a Facebook business page in Columbus are also a good idea. The challenge is that people are typically more inclined to leave a negative review instead of a positive review.
Think back about the last time you arbitrarily left a positive review for average service. It is a good practice to ask satisfied customers to leave a positive review immediately while they are happy about their experience.
15. Making a Unique 404 Page
404 errors occur on all kinds of sites. Ideally, the best practice to catch them and redirect them, but in case this doesn’t happen in time it is a good idea to use a custom 404 with some kind of call to action that allows the user to click to a different page.
Typically, when users encounter a 404 page they leave the website all together. What you want to do is offer an option that reduces the bounce rate. Some e-commercerce stores in Columbus even offer a discount code that encourages the user to go back and make a purchase.
16. Consistently Posting High Quality Content
The best practice is to continuously be adding high quality, unique content to a website. The more pages and posts a website in Columbus has, the greater the odds are that content will be seen and picked up be relevant sources.
The quantity of pages that a website has is also a factor involved in authority. A high quality site will tend to have numerous pages within a specific context.
Newly added content also has been known to boost a website’s overall ranking. Google appears to trust websites that constantly add new content on a routine basis.
This is known as the Google dance, where Google appears to temporarily boost a new page’s ranking to see if searchers find the content relevant.
One of the best ways to keep customers in Columbus visiting a site is to add content that answers the most common questions that people tend to have in a specific context.
17. Updating Existing Content
No matter what a website addresses, the content will need to be eventually updated. It could be a good idea to do a 6-12 month review of the site content to see if it really is informative, accurate, and includes a call to action.
Another consideration is to ensure that your website in Columbus is not cannibalizing its own ranking potential by having multiple pages targeting the same keyword phrases. This can be resolved by checking the keyword ranking and the pages associated with what keyword.
Often existing pages and articles can be improved by adding (or sometimes subtracting) the content on them. The best thing is to follow the standard on-page optimization considerations, but then really write for the reader – not for Google bots.
One more factor to consider is to check the LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords to ensure that some of these are also included in a natural manner.
More helpful reference at http://www.instantshift.com/2018/06/08/10-reasons-update-website-content/
18. Re-purposing Old Website Content
If you want to boost a website’s traffic, then often this can be done by converting old written content into a new format like a PDF, recorded audio for a podast, voice-over video, or slides.
There are numerous ways to leverage existing content, and the final format really depends upon the end-user who you want to target.
19. Making a Site Mobile Friendly
Still, at the time of writing this article, there are numerous websites that are not mobile friendly. The estimation is that around 60% of search inquires are now conducted on mobile devices.
Think about it… Someone has a topic on their mind and they have a spare moment while waiting in a subway, coffee shop, hey… even the bathroom. And, what are they doing? Googling something of interest.
If you want a website to rank in Columbus , then it needs to be mobile optimized. On a content management system like WordPress, it is pretty easy to create a mobile website version. The interesting consideration is that it appears that Google is now indexing mobile sites before desktop sites.
20. Buying Nofollow backlink Ads
Promoting a website in Columbus through paid nofollow backlinks is perfectly fine. There are even some considerations as to whether or not advertising on Google AdWords can impact ranking (and indexing) of a poor-ranking website or a site that is not indexed.
What isn’t considered is that buying ads can drive specific targeted traffic from Columbus. Targeted traffic that stays on a website and potentially makes an action of some sort (buy, browsing various pages, clicking through to social pages, etc). These can all be favorable signals for search engine ranking.
21. Hacking the Competition’s Backlinks
Unpaid, unsolicited backlinks from Columbus are hard to get. If you can get them, they tend to be the most effective. One way to enhance ranking is to emulate the top ranking competitors in Columbus on page 1 backlink profile.
There are numerous sites like Ahrefs, SemRush, Majestic, etc. that can provide backlink profiles. By analyzing a competitor’s backlink profile, you can create a matching backlink profile to boost the web page you are optimizing.
23. Artificial Traffic Manipulation
One important factor that must be managed is the click through rate (CTR) and on-page time spent and on-page activities.
Depending upon the size of an organization or a business network, it is possible to potentially swing search results in favor a website by having other people from Columbus on unique IP addresses search for a keyword phrase and click through until they find your website page.
Once the web page is found in the search results, the person from Columbus clicks through to the page and they spend a few minutes on the page reading the content, watching videos, clicking the buy buttons, visiting other pages, etc.
Now, this needs to be done in a systematic manner and will require more than just a few people from a few unique IP addresses doing it each month. Nonetheless it can help trigger the appropriate algorithms.
Conclusion
These strategies can be applies to a variety of websites in Columbus and in nearly all niches. Not all of them will be actionable, but most of these SEO strategies in Columbus will work and should be safe.
They will require some testing and adaptation, and this is the reason to monitor ranking pages for specific keyword phrases.
