Contributed by Emma Carter
Emma Carter is a copywriter at Recruitment Traffic, an agency that provides SEO and Google Ads services.
Your website is an important tool for social networking, public relations, attracting customers, and interesting potential employees. To maximize its potential, you’ll want to publish content pages (blog posts), landing pages (marketing pages for various products and services), as well as informational pages that customers can find using a variety of keywords.
Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses a variety of techniques that draw people to your website and help the pages of your website rank higher on Google. SEO consists of both:
- on-page optimization – improving the content on each webpage on your site
- off-page optimization – asking relevant third party websites to link to your webpages
This article will focus on on-page SEO.
1. Create Quality Blog Content
Publish regularly. Hire a copywriter if needed.
Good SEO virtually requires that you write fresh content for your audience – ideally on a weekly, bimonthly, or at least monthly basis. If you don’t have the time, you can always hire a copywriter from sources like the Cult of Copy job board.
Ideally you should find a writer who specialized in your industry. Hiring a specialist will help you publish authoritative material that will interest your target audience.
While a copywriter can often research material to use in their blog posts, you can also provide original ideas and unique information by asking your writer to pull material from a podcast episode you recorded, or you can invite your writer to interview about each topic they blog about.
Find the content that works best for you.
Blog content can include:
- Answers to commonly asked questions in your field
- Original research studies that others in your industry can refer to (and link to)
- Case studies sharing client success stories
- How-to guides to educate potential customers
- Thought leadership with a unique point of view
- Listicles – articles structured as numbered lists
Find your competitive advantage.
In today’s competitive market, it’s difficult to rank on Google unless you publish blog content that is distinctly better than your competition. These are a few strategies that will help you gain an advantage:
- You can answer questions related to unique search queries that don’t have a lot of information published about them.
- You can improve on your competition by going into greater depth, linking to higher quality sources, including downloadable bonuses, attaching infographics, and publishing video and audio to enhance your posts.
- You can strategize around backlinks. For example, if you conduct original research, you can share it with industry groups. This creates an opportunity for prominent websites to cite your research and link back to your website. Once you’ve published great content, gaining backlinks is essential to getting visibility for your work. For an overview of advanced link-building strategies, check out Julian Goldie‘s YouTube playlist, Effective Link-Building Strategies. When you’re ready to scale, check out link building strategies for SaaS businesses; backlink research software like Ahrefs, SE Ranking or SEMrush; and personalized outreach automation software like Pitchbox or Respona.
- You can create social media friendly content. Test some of the content types we suggested and see what ones your social media following “likes” and engages with the most.
Google tracks how long people spend on every webpage, so the better you serve your visitors, the higher Google will rank your pages in search results.
To make sure Google doesn’t penalize your website, be sure to follow best practices for technical SEO. An optimized website will have fast load time, clear navigation, interlinked content, encryption, and mobile accessibility.
2. Narrow Your Topic
Focus on niche keyword phrases.
A lot of writers make the mistake of writing about too broad of a topic. You are more likely to rank on the first page of Google if you focus on a narrow subject that exactly matches a topic searched by a small audience of people. Only once you have an established brand presence would it make sense to target more broad keywords.
A website with a defined niche is a valuable asset. You can monetize a niche website with affiliate marketing, advertising, sponsored posts, courses, and memberships.
Where can you get ideas for blog material?
Try checking…
- The latest news
- Conversations on social media
- Trending events
- What the world is searching for, according to Google Trends
3. Avoid Posting Duplicate Content
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is content that is repeated multiple times on your website or on your website and other websites. It can be identical or nearly identical,
Can you post duplicate content?
Google won’t necessarily penalize you for duplicate content, however Google’s SEO guidelines advise against creating duplicate content. If Google detects that you are posting duplicate content in an effort to manipulate their search engine, you’re liable to have your webpage (or in rare cases, your website) removed from search results.
Here’s what to post instead.
Many people create duplicate content because they feel they don’t have the time or resources to create original content, or they’re stretched too thin trying to “feed the content machine”. To avoid this trap, remember Google’s basic webmaster principles:
- Make webpages for users, not search engines.
- Never deceive users.
- Think about what will make your website unique, valuable and engaging.
Think of your website like you would any other important piece of content – like a book or a news journal. How will you make it stand out from your competition?
Check for originality.
If you need to post about similar material on multiple websites, try approaching the subject from a different angle, tweaking the intended audience, or at least changing the wording. The plagiarism checker from Small SEO Tools can help you check that content your writers or guest writers submit is unique.
4. Write Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
Meta tags are a small group of texts intended to aid Google and other search engines to know more about your website and its content. You can’t see these tags on your pages. However, they are visible to search engines and their users.
These text snippets can boost your on-page SEO effort because it affects how your pages appear on the search results.
Title Tags
Title tags are the text you see on top of the web browser. Make sure to include in these tags the relevant keywords.
Meta Descriptions
Meta description attributes are essential because they allow both users and search engines to learn about your website and pages. Make sure to write persuasive Meta descriptions if you want to:
- Increase your Click-through-rates (CTR)
- Obtain a high ranking on Google
- Create better brand awareness
- Obtain greater online visibility
Now, how can you make your Meta descriptions compelling to your intended audience? Consider the following steps:
- Limit the description’s text length to 160 characters
- Give your audience the information they need
- Make the meta descriptions enticing to read
- Include a call-to-action (CTA)
When checking for Metadata attributes, consider using tools such as SERPsim.
After you create a new web page, it’s a good idea to conduct a SEO audit to diagnose any problems that could impact the page’s ability to rank well in search engines.
5. Create Effective Landing Pages
Landing pages are single page sites that are designed to:
- Gather your visitor’s details
- Lead them to your conversion goal
If you want to create useful recruitment landing pages, take these steps:
Write interesting headlines.
When people go to landing pages, headlines are the first thing they see. However, if they can’t pass beyond your title, it’s unlikely that they’ll read the rest of the content. It’s essential to include your offer in the headline. Make the title short but clear.
Consider removing navigation buttons.
If you remove the buttons, you can expect a conversion increase of up to 100 percent. Without such a menu, there is nothing that will distract your prospect from your offer.
Create more than one landing page.
Research has shown that recruiting agencies with more than a dozen landing pages can enjoy a more than 50 percent increase in leads. If you’re targeting candidates from multiple industries or places, you should create various recruitment landing pages.
Keep your page load speed under 3 seconds.
Even a one-second delay can decrease your conversion rate by almost 10 percent. You can also use tools, such as GT metrix, to ensure your site can load within three seconds or less. If the pages are slow to load, better talk to your web developers to speed up those pages.
Include a call-to-action on every landing page.
Multiple CTAs can distract potential job seekers. It may even hinder from completing the form or the desired action. Prevent such distractions by keeping only CTA per landing page.
Conclusion
Optimizing the content on your website is called “on-page SEO”. After you finish optimizing, it’s time to move onto “off-page SEO”. Off-page SEO is all about collecting backlinks from high-quality websites on the Internet. When Google sees a lot of websites linking back to the pages on your website, the search engine will promote your content higher in their search results. This will help more people discover your content.
You can get started on your journey with off-page SEO using a took like Ranktracker. This will help you “spy” on your competitors’ backlinks and monitor when a link is added or removed from your website.
You can find other fantastic SEO tools on Sitetrail that will speed up your workflow.
Like accounting, finance, and advertising, SEO is a complex field. Many companies outsource their SEO so they can focus on their primary business activities. You can consult with a few SEO companies like clickintelligence.co.uk to get insights on how you can improve your website’s traffic and sales conversions.