How to Move the SEO Needle for Your Company

Search engine optimization for your company’s web content is not a one-and-done proposition. Businesses may spend months creating a new website. Once it’s live, some of them don’t go near it again for long periods of time.

Not sustaining ongoing efforts to improve your website’s performance is a major mistake. Even if you maintain SEO vigilance, you still may not see your digital content moving up the ranks fast enough. That can make it seem like your investment isn’t paying off.

As with most things in life, patience is the key to helping your ranking inch up. If you’re stuck anywhere but at the top, you can take steps to change that. Here’s how to move the SEO needle for your company.

1. Always Track Your Clicks and Conversions

If you aren’t tracking data on your clicks and conversions, you should be. How many visitors are clicking on your company in search results? How many are doing what you ask them to do once they’ve arrived?

Of course, tracking the raw numbers is just the first step. Doing something with that information is the next one. What you learn about prospects and those who convert to customers or clients should inform your SEO strategy.

Figuring out what strategies you can employ to move up in search rankings is key. For example, many people looking for an attorney will type “best lawyers near me” into Google and hit return. Then they’ll click on the websites that land in the top four or five organic search results. If your law firm SEO doesn’t put you there, you need to determine why.

There are reasons why some prospects click on your website and why some then convert to clients. Learn which ones do and why, and which ones don’t and why not, and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. Let your click and conversion data guide you.

2. Never Neglect Your Content Strategy

An unattended content strategy is often the culprit when you’re seeing little upward SEO movement. If you have ever gotten traction out of a great piece of content, you should understand this takeaway. The point is that one excellent blog post can’t carry the weight of an entire site. To really make an impact, you need to build on that one successful post to create a web of SEO-optimized content. 

The secrets to any effective content strategy are currency, authority, and relevancy.  Even if you tick all three boxes when you upload content, time will start unticking them. To avoid that eventuality, keep your published content updated at all times.

Staying on top of your content is good. Getting out in front of it is even better. Revisit every piece regularly to assess its SEO value, anticipating revisions that will help it keep its shine.

Also, regular helpings of fresh content, particularly blog posts containing videos, images, and graphics, will attract the attention of search engines. So take the time to develop a formal content calendar that’s agile enough to react to current events. And make sure you evaluate each piece for currency, authority, and relevance to your prospects before you publish it.

3. Kick the Clickbait

Google has made a commitment to improving the relevance and usefulness of its search results. According to this massive search engine, 15% of searches every day are original. It’s relying on its evolving algorithms and AI to please millions of inquiring minds.

Clickbait, the turn-of-the-century SEO gambit of choice, is a victim of Google’s commitment to usefulness — as it should be. If you don’t kick the clickbait in your own digital content to the curb, you will be punished. The algorithm will banish it from any prospect of upward mobility.

There are ways to achieve the attention-grabbing goals of clickbait without ill-gotten means. For example, instead of inserting some awkward and irrelevant question in a blog post, develop FAQs. They’ll capitalize on your audience members’ longtail keyword searches without getting you shunted to the SEO sidelines.

Again, it’s wise to keep your content relevant. Given that clickbait as an SEO strategy is being ushered out, freely let it go. When you provide truly useful content that addresses your audience’s needs, that SEO needle will move in the right direction.

4. Check Your Vitals

Audience satisfaction is a concern shared by both you, as the content owner, and Google. That’s why Google developed its Core Web Vitals: to help deliver a great user experience. Core Web Vitals relate to page-loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

The speed at which your page loads when users click on the link has become more important than ever. That’s attributed to the ever-increasing number of them using mobile devices to conduct searches. If your page doesn’t load rapidly, a visitor will click the back button and find one that does.

Responsiveness relates to “first input delay,” or the time it takes for your website to respond to a user’s clicks. That could be the time it takes for the individual to arrive at a link clicked on the home page. Meanwhile, visual stability measures the amount of shift a page makes when, for example, an ad loads across the top.

All three Core Web Vitals obviously make a difference in the user’s experience, for better or worse. Search engines will reward companies with strong vitals and penalize weak ones. Make sure yours are top-notch.

Rising to the Top

Summiting the search engine rankings aren’t easy. After all, you’re competing against nearly two billion websites, so that mountain is pretty crowded.

But if your company wants to stake a claim at the top, there are ways to get there. Make no mistake, you will need to commit a significant amount of time, money, and vigilance to the effort. But if you’re willing to do so, nothing can hold your company down.

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