6 Highly Effective Ways to Improve SEO Before the End of the Year
6 Quick and Easy Improve SEO Tips for Your Website
If you find yourself shaking your head wondering where the year has gone, how to improve SEO for your website, and how there is now less than three months left before 2022, we promise, you are not alone.
You may be scrambling with a long list of To Dos’ that you hope to check off. Maybe you are looking for a few new opportunities to finish the year on a strong note. Or perhaps you’ve ignored SEO for too long and want to improve SEO, rankings, and traffic before the end of the year.
No matter where you find yourself, we’ve got you covered.
Consider this article a roadmap to help you focus on last minute gains you can make on your website, digital search visibility, and overall branding this year.
Our criteria for this “How to improve SEO in what’s left of 2021” list is that the idea must:
- Be doable by the average non-SEO savvy person
- Take less than a couple hours to accomplish
- Have a definite impact on Search Visibility, Branding, and/or SEO
- Be a common missed opportunity by our new clients and the prospects we speak to
Without any further delay, here is the list on how to improve SEO for your website:
1. Ask three customers for a Google review.
Do you realize that:
- 89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase (source: TrustPilot.com)
- 59% of consumers use Google to read reviews (source: BizRateInsights.com)
Start by brainstorming a few customers that will be easy to ask for a good word. This may be a long term customer who always tells you how much they benefit from your services or products. Or you could wait to receive a compliment from a customer who has just had a great experience and ask them for a review while you are still top of mind.
Suggestions:
Draft a short email asking if they would be willing to help you by sharing their experience via a Google review. Let them know this helps because you have people reading reviews who want to know what it’s like working with you.
Make it easy for them to write a review by sharing a link to your Google My Business Profile. Don’t know how to generate a link?
Learn how to make a link for customers to write reviews on Google.
You can also help them with what to share by providing a few prompts, such as:
- What was it like doing business with us?
- What impressed you the most about our [product/service]?
- How did we help solve your problem?
Once they write a review, make sure you log into your Google My Business account and write a response thanking them for their kind words.
NEXT LEVEL PRO TIP: Stop having to ask each customer for a review. You can improve SEO by looking into an automated system that asks your customers for feedback to keep your number of reviews growing each week. The feedback system will be infinitely valuable as the steady stream of reviews improves rankings and your search prominence. It will also support business growth and development as you find out what is most important to your clients, where you excel, and how you can improve.
Ask us more about our automated Reputation Management options!
2. Upload new pictures to your Google My Business account.
Google says that, “High-quality photos on your business listing can improve your user experience, and make it easier for customers to find you.”
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a professional photographer to tackle this one. A few new pictures are better than old, dated pictures or none at all!
Suggestions:
Grab your phone and snap a few new pictures of the exterior of your building, lobby, hallways, waiting area, retail space, front desks, offices, and other areas your customers may want to see online before visiting you in person. You can also upload new pictures of your product and services in action.
NEXT LEVEL PRO TIP: Schedule a time with our Google Street View Trusted Photographer to come take 360 Virtual footage of your interior and exterior. This is then edited and uploaded to your Google My Business account for everyone to see. Listings with photos and a virtual tour are twice as likely to generate interest!
3. Revamp or expand your About Us page.
Did you know that the About Us page is one of your website’s most important pages? This is how your visitors get to know your company, build trust in your offerings, understand your reputation, and ultimately form their expectations of what it’ll be like to do business with you.
It is also an underutilized opportunity for keyword and location optimization to help improve SEO. You can really use your About Us page to help the Search Engines understand the services you offer and where you offer them.
When was the last time you updated your About Us page?
Suggestions:
Here’s are a number of things to consider adding to your About Us page to improve user experience and SEO:
- Story – how your business started, why you got into the business, key milestones along the way, how business has grown, etc.
- Numbers – how many years have you been in business, total years of experience among your team, number of clients, number of successful orders, number of locations, number of reviews, etc.
- People – share about your Founder and key people on your team. After all, we buy from people that we like and can relate to.
- Video – add some interactive content about your business, your location(s), your staff, your services, etc.
- Qualifications – tell about key membership, certifications, awards, etc.
- Images – a picture tells a thousand words. Include images of your location(s), staff, services, etc.
- USP – make sure that your Unique Selling Proposition is crystal clear. What sets you apart from the competition? Typically you can sum this up in three or four main points.
- Solutions – your visitors ultimately wants to know how you will solve their problem and how you will make their life better.
4. Check Your Page Experience Signals and Take Action If Needed
If there is one thing 2021 has taught us about how to improve SEO it’s that Page Experience matters – do not miss this!
In June 2021 Google launched its new Google Page Experience algorithm which introduced Core Web Vitals. This includes:
- Interactivity of your website (how long it takes before a user can interact with the page)
- Loading performance (how long it takes the largest content element on your page to render)
- And visual stability (unexpected shifting of content on the page)
Google Page Experience search signals consist of Core Web Vitals, Mobile Friendly, Safe Browsing, HTTPS, No Instrusive Interstitials
Suggestions:
To start, take some time to click through your website and see if its speed and responsiveness is smooth enough. Do you get frustrated in how pages load? Chances are if you feel frustrated your visitors do too!
Next, run your PageSpeed Insights by Google. The tool will analyze the content of your web page and generate suggestions on how to make the page faster. What you’ll find most useful is your main score out of 100 and additional lab data that is color coded to understand whether the data is good or needs improvement.
You can also try out GTMetrix and Pingdom for additional data.
Finally, contact your web developer or website designer for an action plan on how you can improve your website speed and performance this year yet. Keep in mind that this can be complicated and isn’t a DIY solution. There will be time and money costs that are well worth the investment.
NEXT LEVEL PRO TIP: Familiarize yourself with Google’s requirements for fast websites by reading some of our other Page Speed articles:
5. Check Out Your Branded SERP and your Competitors’ SERP.
This is one of my personal favorites to do every few months to improve SEO. It’s always interesting to see how Google views your business and what type of results it thinks are most relevant and useful to help searchers get acquainted with your brand.
Head to Google, type in your business name, and scan the results.
Who does Google think you are and how does it display your brand to an interested searcher?
Suggestions:
Click each result and review the page or profile to ensure total accuracy and completeness. You’ll often find social media accounts, local directory listings, or news articles as top results after your own website listing.
Make sure that each of these top results accurately represents your brand and gives the reader what they need to know about you. If needed, claim the listing, add new images, update contact information and revamp details on profiles where you have the ability to do so (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.). Send an update request to the website owner if you aren’t able to change the details yourself.
Don’t just stop there … next check out what results each of your competitors’ brand names bring up. Are there opportunities to create new profiles? Chances are if Google is showing those results for two or more of your competitors it’s important for you to be in the space too.
Remember, the more often your company Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) is listed on websites the better! These are also referred to as citations and are an important SEO factor – especially for local businesses.
6. Add a testimonial and FAQ section to each main service page on your website.
Testimonials and FAQ’s are great ways to:
- Improve user experience
- Improve on page content optimization
The best part is that both are pretty easy and straightforward to create.
Suggestions:
Testimonials – If you have a solid collection of testimonials and reviews from customers why not beef up each service page by adding a unique testimonial? Pick a testimonial relevant to the exact service and add it to the page.
This not only gives an opportunity for additional content optimization on the page but it helps to instill trust and confidence. You’ll help set the standard of what your visitor can expect if they pick your service.
FAQ’s – you likely get the same four to five questions about each service you offer. Typically these revolve around cost, timeframes, and what’s included. This gives your visitors the answers they are looking for and allows for additional keyword optimized content on the page. Plus it provides the added bonus of educating and informing your customers which can save you time.
Once you have your own list of FAQ’s head to Google and do a few keyword searches on your page’s target service and keywords. You’ll likely see Google’s “People Also Ask” near the top of results. Add some of these relevant questions with your answers as well.
NEXT LEVEL PRO TIP: Once added you can ask an SEO to apply proper schema markup to the FAQ’s and testimonials to help them appear right in Google Search Results. This can improve the visibility of your result and increase SERP click-throughs.
Finish Off Strong
There you have it folks. Six things you can do right now to improve SEO on your website. What else would you add to the list of SEO improvements?
You can contact our team online or call us at 1-888-262-6687 if you have any unanswered SEO questions lingering this year.
We are happy to discuss the details of your website and provide additional SEO improvement ideas specific to your website’s current situation and market.
