5 Ways to Supercharge Your SEO This Summer

The pace of life and work in Texas slows down in the summertime as the mercury climbs towards triple digits and those of us not on vacation are likely daydreaming about cold beverages, flip flops and sand in our suitcases.

While “spring cleaning” has its place, for a change of pace, summer can be a good time to tidy up your inbound marketing such as supercharging your SEO (search engine optimization) to make sure your website is ready to capture potential clients and business the rest of the year.

And unlike questionable holiday tattoos, inking surefire SEO strategies will not only look good today but will help your business in the future as organic SEO is not just a short-term fix like a traditional advertising campaign, but is a long-term solution that can pay dividends for years.

What is Organic SEO?

When we talk about organic SEO, we are talking about that sometimes-secretive science of making sure your website and its pages rank high for specific keywords on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Organic means non-paid so when you “Google” something online, those results returned that are not ads or paid for by sponsors are organic results.

In today’s search engine world, the organic results are basically the meat sandwiched around a growing number of ad slots. Ranking high on the search engine results pages, called SERPs, is important, especially gaining coveted space on the first page of SERPs.

Organic SEO: Quality and Quantity Both Important

The more fine-tuned your organic SEO, the more traffic your website will receive in terms of both quality and quantity. Quality is important because receiving page views for the sake of page views is counterproductive if they are misdirected. For example, if you are in France and looking for “Paris Cleaners” then this organic first page result -- https://pariscleaners.com/ -- is not really going to help you because the business is located in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

On the flip side, this Paris Cleaners needs clicks from those with dirty laundry near Lake Michigan … not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Why Organic SEO is More Important Than Ever

While we have always thought organic SEO was important for your inbound marketing, it may be more important than ever with current changes in data privacy affecting what tools marketers have access to. “Some top sources of user data are being restricted or eliminated, and it could spell trouble for those who count on this data to understand their customers,” wrote Hannah Trivette in Forbes last month.

Trivette cites Apple’s iOS 14.5 release, which eliminates the default data collection on user online activity which resulted in all those personalized ads you see on mobile devices. Users with the update must now opt in and consent to this data collection. Apple’s action comes after Google moved to eliminate third-party cookies, those digital files that track your online activity across websites, from its Chromes browser.

The tightening of data privacy will no doubt continue across all platforms, making organic SEO that much more valuable as many companies may feel like they are flying blind when it comes to attracting potential customers and business. 

“Organic SEO, on the other hand, gives companies greater control over their online presence and how they appear to users. Rather than app data and paid ads, SEO uses search engine data to discover what products and services users are looking for and helps connect them with the companies that offer what they need,” wrote Trivette.

Organic SEO: Stop Playing the Guessing Game

There came a time a couple of years ago when HubSpot noticed that its monthly blog traffic not only stopped rising but was declining. In any business, and in almost any context, declining numbers can set off alarm bells.

HubSpot did a deep dive and found that the then-status quo of brainstorming topics and basically making educated guesses of what potential customers were looking for was not good enough.

They needed organic SEO.

“We decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel that has consistently generated most of our blog’s traffic for its entire existence — organic search,” writes HubSpot’s Rebecca Riserbato. HubSpot’s traffic not only surged after their commitment to organic SEO but the company has been on a growth spurt, growing its revenue by 41 percent in the first quarter of 2021.

It may sound like an oversimplification to say that organic SEO done right leads to more traffic and more traffic leads to more customers and more customers leads to more revenue … but then, sometimes there is beauty and truth in simplicity.

5 Essential Organic SEO Tips

There are enough organic SEO tactics that you could read a dozen books on the topic and just scratch the surface. Basically, your priority is to make sure that search engines can correctly and easily identify your useful content and direct people to it.

That “useful content” most tuned to what you perceive your potential or ideal customer is searching for and what keywords or search terms are they utilizing. Riserbato in her article highlights 19 tips that HubSpot used to optimize their organic search. Let’s look at five essential organic SEO tips they used:

Not everything you publish has to be search-friendly: Yes, we are starting with a curve ball because while you must consider on-page SEO, not everything you publish has to be search-friendly.

“Prioritize optimizing for search when the opportunity is greater than the time invested and leave the rest on the back burner. Tackle the back burner once you're able to build a process to reduce the amount of time needed to optimize," says HubSpot’s Victor Pan, head of Technical SEO.

Pan says that inside pages such as ad landing pages, thank you pages, internal sales enablement pages, and login pages can be on the SEO backburner while you focus on optimizing essential pages with elements such as:

• High-quality Content
• Page Titles
• Headers
• Meta Descriptions
• Image Alt-text

Target high and low volume keywords: Variety is a spice of the SEO life - target both high and low volume keywords for best results.

“Broad, early-interest keywords tend to be higher in volume, while later-interest or even purchase-ready keywords tend to be lower in volume because the audience is more specific. Therefore, you shouldn't be afraid to target low-volume keywords if they have a higher likelihood of turning traffic into leads or customers," said HubSpot’s Braden Becker, SEO strategist.

By using high and low volume keywords your SEO strategy can help cover the entire buyer’s journey, just not their first steps.

Don’t change URLs: If you can avoid it, do not change your URLs because when you do change them, it can lead to a plunge in traffic and search ranking.

According to SEO company Ignite Visibility, “Google’s John Mueller has explained that when too many URLs are changed, it can take Google a lot of time to reprocess and rediscover them, especially if they are not at the root level. This results in significant drops in rankings and undetermined recovery time.”

Add alt text to every image: Help search engine crawlers by adding alt text to every image because AI has its limitations and one of them is understanding what the image means or stands for.

Not only will you stay on the good side of the bots, which is important in SEO, but you will also give yourself a chance to rank high in image-based SERPs.

Leverage CTAs as often as possible: Traffic is great, but you have to direct the potential customers to action if you want to convert them.

CTA or calls to action should be relevant to the page content and the stage of the buyer’s journey.

HubSpot says, “Every page on your site is an opportunity for conversion, so every page on your site should include a CTA that aligns with visitor search intent. Since you can assume that page visitors are there to learn something, CTAs are exciting as they offer more insight and educational information.”

These are some great surefire ways to help you supercharge your SEO this summer, but there is so much more an inbound marketing agency like adWhite can do to help optimize your website for search engines.

Contact us today to schedule a free website consultation … which, of course, is our way of ending this article by leveraging a CTA which we think will be beneficial to you and your business.