4 Relatively Obscure Ways to Improve Your Website’s SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a confusing process for the uninitiated, considering the myriad sources telling you how and what to do. An important aspect you need to consider here is that it is a continuous process, as opposed to a technique that you implement once to generate immediate results. If you want your website to generate results and rank higher on Google, you need to constantly improve and update it, to meet the SEO guidelines. 

Apart from the popular ways and well-known ways to achieve this, here are a few relatively obscure ways in which you can improve your website SEO:

#1 Integrate and Add more Visuals

Engaging your visitors is one of the primary ways to increase the SEO performance of your website. Moreover, if you want to make a memorable mark on your visitors, it is also important for you to give enough visual cues for them to navigate your content. According to HubSpot, 49% of marketers today, consider visuals to be an important part of their content and campaigns.

Source: White Space Marketing Group

Using simple and relevant images to support the website content can ensure that the reader not only retains the content but also spends more time engaging with it. This can boost your SEO rankings and can also draw more traffic to your website through other channels. Images are discovered more easily through Google searches offering you more reach to your online audience.

If you are unsure of how to start making your website more visually powerful, here are a few easy ways in which you can do it immediately:

• Adding relevant Free/Stock Images to support content
• Creating infographics to enable better data visualization
• Integrating videos within the website content

#2 Ensure Website Accessibility

Another aspect that not a lot of website marketers focus on yet but is very important, is making the website more accessible. Web accessibility and inclusion have been talked about a lot recently, but even then, very few websites integrate options that can help the disabled navigate their website just as easily as others. If your website is not easily accessible by a broad spectrum of people, you are losing out on potential customers and traffic to your website.

The Title III of the American Disabilities Act (ADA) specifies that a seller should make the goods, services, and marketplace accessible to the disabled, and this applies to digital storefronts as well. If you still think this is optional, consider this: In 2018, 2200 lawsuits were filed against companies violating ADA, up by 180% from 2017, where 876 lawsuits were filed.

Some of the ways in which you can make your website more accessible are: 

• Changing the website aesthetic in terms of visuals and colors 
• Adjusting fonts and contrast settings 
• Integrating plugins enabling text-to-speech and better readability
• Adding alternate modes of navigation, and making the media on the website more accessible

Ensuring web accessibility can be as simple as integrating an accessibility dashboard on the website that the user can use to tweak the content and design to address their needs. Here is an example of a website optimized for users with visual impairments: 

Source: Vieo

#3 Take Google’s Feedback Seriously

Connecting your website to Google Search Console can offer you more benefits than just boosting your website visibility. The team at Google has preset algorithms that identify the areas that can be improved and optimized within your website. They also send you regular updates and emails on the improvements that you can target to make the most of your SEO efforts. 

Some of the improvements that you can receive updates on, include: 

• Technical issues within your website
• Your performance on search results
• Updates on broken links or security of your website

One of the main reasons why  you should keep your eyes open for these updates is because Google will also raise red flags for website issues that might severely affect your rankings and online performance. 

#4 Reoptimize and Refresh Content 

You have probably heard this way too many times – content can be a real gamechanger. If your website is already up and running, you might already have a repository of content on it that is driving traffic for you and helping you in indexing on Google. When you do not want to make any major content additions to your website, the ways to leverage content can seem obscure.

In this case, one of the most efficient ways to make content work for you is to check whether all of it is optimized and updating fresh content wherever necessary. When you optimize your content, look for any gaps in content that you can fill, and any outdated information on your website that might need to change or update. Moreover, if you have a text-heavy website, you can also optimize the content by making it shorter and adding relevant images wherever applicable.

Here are a few ways in which you can reoptimize and make your old content drive results for you: 

• Repurpose your content in multiple formats 
• Promote on social media and support it with visuals 
• Edit and rewrite stale content, and make it more appealing for your current audience

Apart from this, efforts to create backlinks to your website through other channels such as blogs and social media can also be rewarding in terms of driving website SEO and traffic. 

Boost your Website SEO 

There are many steps that you can take to improve your website SEO through your website as well as other channels. Some of the most effective ways to make SEO work for you include taking small steps towards improving the content and visual identity of your website. Most importantly, brands need to keep an eye on the changing Google SEO guidelines and ensure that their content is in line with the most recent updates.

Other than this, making sure that you maintain uniformity and supplement your website performance with other digital channels can also fetch you the desired results.