SEO and showing up in search results
One of the most important considerations when setting up your website and writing content is knowing that your site will show up in search results on online. That’s why search engine optimization, or SEO, should be something you’re thinking about as you plan your site.
The best way to make sure your site is optimized for search engines is to write real, valuable, and straightforward content for your website and to accompany the written content with good-quality pictures that are relevant to the written text. Anything published on your site should have a clear link to the work you do.
While there are many great SEO strategies, there is no way to “game the system.” To help you plan your website content and imagery, we recommend looking at sites you admire by people who do something similar to your work.
That said, there are a number of steps you can take to improve your SEO. Here are a few:
- Decide what keywords you would like to associate with particular pages on your site and use those keywords a few times in the page text
- Provide a short but clear “meta-description” for your site so that search engines can immediately identify what you do
- Write short, relevant “snippet” descriptions for important pages on your site
- Provide alternate text for published images to make your site more accessible
- Give images file names that use page keywords
- Keep your open hours, social media links, and contact information up to date on your site
- If you are a business, create a Google Business profile and to keep the information published up to date
- Regularly update plugins and offer occasional (or frequent) new content to indicate that your site is well-maintained, rather than abandoned
Care Plan SEO Work
For our care plan clients at a Professional tier or higher, we perform monthly incremental SEO work to improve ranking in search results. We’ll make sure your keywords are on point, add featured images to your pages and posts, improve your site meta-data and accessibility. We’ll also work with you to understand your SEO goals. For example, we’ll want to know if it’s more important to you to attract attention from local customers or a national audience or what kind of growth you hope your organization will experience over a set period of time.
For care plan clients at a Standard tier or higher, we license a plugin called Rank Math, which you can use as a guide to improving website SEO for the whole site and in a page-by-page way. If you have a Professional care plan or higher, we’ll use Rank Math to make SEO improvements each month.