A good chunk of on-page SEO centers itself around creating content, then optimizing that content to meet Google’s needs. Before you go creating pages and pages of content, it would be a good idea to clean house to optimize all the pages you already have!
There are many, many, ways of optimizing a website outside of optimizing content, but this is normally where most people start. There is a lot of effort that goes into creating content, and sometimes optimizing in other ways can actually get you further.
So what should you do??
1)Improve your Snippets! Snippets are the extra information that shows up in a website description when it is searched on google. Star reviews, authorship, and Google + circles are often included in snippets. Making these more relevant and plentiful can help your pages look more authoritative and trustworthy on the SERP in the eyes of Google and the user! Be careful to not add authorship to pages where there isn’t one specific author though, such as a contact or about us page. Improper use of authorship has actually been found to hurt your rankings.
2) Improve Crawl Friendliness! If google likes to crawl all of your pages, they will reward you with higher rankings. This being said, if there are some irrelevant pages that are on your website for no apparent reason, Google won’t want to crawl those pages. If you have a large amount of these pages, Google will throw a temper tantrum and most likely deem your entire website an irrelevant, spammy jumble that should not show up on the first page. Deleting irrelevant pages can help reduce the risk of running into this problem.
3)Optimize The Pages That People Like But Aren’t Ranking Organically! Maybe you have a page that you wrote before you even started thinking about your SEO. You take a look at analytics and see that people are getting to this page from a link on your site. They’re staying on this page a much longer than your other pages because it is written much more naturally than a page written with SEO in mind. This page in particular just isn’t ranking organically though. Shift your SEO efforts to this page! It already has content people like, it won’t take much to get it ranking because Google already sees that people are getting to this page and staying. With minimal effort, this page could easily turn into your best performing page.
4)Leverage Your Happy Customers! This is one of the biggest problems with our clients. They have an extremely happy customer base, but they don’t leverage this for their marketing efforts! If you have a happy customer, suggest they leave you a good review or link to you on social media. This may not sound like much but if you multiply this one instance by the hundreds of happy customers you may have, you could see a huge bump in how much traffic your website gets, and how much of that traffic turns into phones calls and sales leads
If you can manage to get all of these of these in check you can bet that you’ll see a boost in your rankings without having to put in the hours of effort it takes to create quality content for optimization.
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.