If you?re unfamiliar with what SEO is, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The goal of SEO is to increase both the quality and quantity of your website traffic through organic searches. Most searches are done via websites like Google (75% of market share is held by Google) or Bing. (Anyone remember Ask Jeeves?)
Of all the Google searches, only ~2.8% of clicks are paid advertisements. Which means organic search results are incredibly important, and we need to pay attention that we’re not only showing up, but that what’s being pulled is up to date and relevant.
So, here are 5 simple tips to improve your SEO.
Create great content
Putting useful content on your page, and going in depth on one topic vs a myriad of subjects will help you rank higher in search results.
Make your page fast to load, and mobile-friendly
Google rewards mobile friendly sites. Over half of searches are done via mobile devices. So having a mobile friendly site not only helps your SEO but improves your end user experience which is super important.
Keep your plugins to a minimum
DO NOT go plugin crazy. One plugin I would highly recommend though is YOAST. Yoast will allow you to change your headlines, and manually update the metadata on your web page.
Use software like Screaming Frog to crawl your website and find broken links, discover duplicate pages, analyze page titles and meta data to help you optimize content, which are all really important when it comes to SEO.
Submit a sitemap for Google to crawl.
This is you basically telling Google, Hey! I?m here..and here are my pages. You don?t HAVE to do this. But by creating your own sitemap, you take the reigns and make sure that Google?s results are up to date in real time.??This is a really helpful article from Neil Patel on how to do this.
Optimize your images
Make sure you use proper formats like JPGs or PNGs. You don?t need to be super technical to do this, there?s plenty of free software like PicResize to do this for you.
Hopefully you can take advantage of some of the free tools and resources out there! Comment below if you have any questions, I’d love to chat.
4 replies on “5 Ways To Improve SEO”
Good suggestions, Meagan. There is so much to church SEO, but one big suggestion I’d add is to create, claim and verify your church’s Google My Business listing. I created this step-by-step guide that shows how to do it:
https://www.ourchurch.com/blog/2018/10/10/how-to-create-claim-verify-google-my-business-listing/
Yes, your google business account is incredibly important! Thanks for sharing!
Good post. Claiming and optimizing your Google Business profile is probably the #1 thing that all churches should do to improve their search visibility.
As for optimizing images, resizing your site’s images won’t do anything to help you in Google’s eyes. If you use a website template, resizing images to the recommended dimensions will help improve user experience, but that’s not SEO.
Here are a few ways you can optimize images for SEO:
– Change the File Name.
– Change the Alt Tag. This helps with both SEO and for accessibility for people using assistive devices.
– Pick the right first image. On most mobile searches, Google is showing an image next to local results. This is often the first image below the hero section. Check your website’s mobile results and, if an unflattering or unwanted photo is appearing, you will want to choose another one.
Hope that helps!
Society of Promotion of Elfish Welfare? Harry and Ron i guess