It’s no surprise that ranking at the top of organic search results can significantly impact your business by providing a steady stream of new leads and potential customers. 

Did you know search engine optimization (SEO) plays an important role in improving your site’s organic traffic and ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing? 

In this blog, we'll showcase a client’s website, Dental Image Therapy Centres, as an example of how we help improve their online presence.

If you’re looking to improve your SEO campaign, here are five simple ways to ensure your website ranks higher than your competitors and your website traffic doesn’t drop. 

Perform Keyword Research

Researching keywords for your web page helps develop the framework for your content and enables you to understand what your audience is looking for. Keywords should look natural in your content. Don’t force a keyword into a sentence.

We use Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to look up keywords relevant to a site. These keywords can help identify relevant content to write about. This tool also allows you to see how often these keywords are used, how difficult it is to rank on a search engine and if any search engine results pages (SERP) are present for that term.

Create Quality And Relevant Content

When you’re developing content for your website, take note of its quality, relevance and structure. Each page should have crucial information at the top of the page and relevant headers (especially an H1) to let readers know what to expect in the next section. Headers improve user experience and allow search engines to identify your content’s topic, so inserting relevant keywords can be helpful. You can also use bold or italics fonts to highlight keyword phrases. All this combined with relevant content helps search engines understand your content better. 

Track Your SEO Metrics

Now that you have created the content, you’ll need to check where it’s going. If you want a comprehensive view of how your site is doing against competitors, we recommend using Semrush’s domain overview and traffic analytics. These tools can give you insights into organic traffic, general traffic sources and even how users behave on your site and your competitor’s site. Through Semrush’s domain overview, you’ll be able to get a high-level look of your website’s organic traffic over time. This includes a breakdown of organic versus paid traffic as well as which keywords are performing well. You can look at up to five competing domains and compare your site’s performance. Here’s a rundown of Dental Image Therapy Centres’ organic traffic in the past two years:

Then, you can use Semrush’s traffic analytics for a closer look at your traffic, including total visits and traffic sources (direct, referral, search, social and paid). The tool also provides you with a unique traffic journey that allows you to see where the traffic is coming from and where it goes once it leaves your site. This provides insights into user behaviour as you’ll be able to see where people go after visiting your website. 

Optimize Your Metadata

Your page title and meta description are often the first things potential visitors see when using search engines and keywords relevant to your website. Users might even decide whether or not to visit your website based on the metadata. These few words hold a lot of power, so make sure they’re impactful. There’s no set rule on how long your meta descriptions should be, but they should be succinct and articulate while including target keywords. 

Use Short And Descriptive URLs

An SEO-friendly URL helps search engines understand your page and provides a better appearance in the SERPs. All in all, an effective URL should:

• Use keywords. Preferably include a primary keyword (the most used).
• Be readable. When a user looks at the URL, they should be able to understand what the page is about.
• Be concise. Shorter URLs with about 60 characters are preferable. Most search engines are unable to process longer URLs, resulting in a lower ranking.

Are you an SEO newbie? You can learn more about SEO in our previous Dooley Noted blog. 

Dooley PR and Marketing offers SEO solutions to generate and maximize organic traffic to your website. Currently, we’re building a team full of experts who specialize in marketing communications strategies - from content creation to digital marketing to public relations. Contact us today to book a consultation.