How to Improve Your Website’s SEO

With so much ever-changing information out there on the topic of SEO, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure of how best to proceed to drive traffic and earn higher rankings for your brand. We understand this dilemma, as many of our clients face it — to keep it simple, here’s how we at Funkhaus see SEO, and what we do to optimize clients’ content.

Know The Basics

If you want to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), it’s essential to understand what search engine algorithms exist for in the first place — to provide useful content in response to a user’s search. That means that in order to rank well, or appear high up in search results, your website needs to be recognized as a reliable source of information.

The reality is, search engine algorithms are unpredictable. While Funkhaus-built sites are optimized as best we can, it’s still tricky to achieve a boost in your page rankings and to appear in more searches. For this reason, we’re wary of any company that claims to be able to guarantee an improvement in your rankings.?

Build Your Site Strategically

Your #1 priority should be making sure that your website contains relevant, high-quality content about your company and capabilities — after all, that’s what users are looking for. Ask yourself — would this content be helpful if people came across it after their search query? Would it answer their questions about your brand?

Your website should also be organized in a way that makes it easy for search engine crawlers to index, which includes establishing a clear hierarchy with well-defined sections and subsections, and implementing a sitemap to also help crawlers understand and index your site more effectively. It also helps to make good use of meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, to provide search engines with a concise summary of each page's content. The bottom line is: if your website is built on a clear, clean codebase with a definitive architecture that provides digestible hierarchy to this machine’s “eyes,” you’ll be in good shape.?

Keep It Fresh

When was the last time you updated your site with new content? One of the strongest ways to boost your SEO is to have an active news section, where you can wax poetic with a keyword-focused approach before cross-posting on your social channels. Doing this creates a rich ecosystem that teaches search engines to treat your pages with a higher degree of relevance than a similarly positioned company without the same unique content. Regularly updating with fresh content also signals to search engines that your site is active and bumps it up in priority for re-crawling, further improving your chances of ranking higher.

Link Up?

One of the most significant indicators of your content's value is how often it’s shared and referenced by others — if others find your content helpful, that’s huge. This is especially true of sites with a higher domain authority, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and press articles. Cross-linking these tells Google that your site is to be respected — clearly, because you have these other important sites pointing their traffic in your direction. Promoting your content on social media is also a good move to increase visibility and encourage sharing. While not a direct ranking factor, social performance can indirectly influence your SEO by driving traffic and increasing the likelihood of backlinks, so we think it's worth it.

Make It A Smooth Ride

Providing an easy and pleasurable user experience (UX) is increasingly important in SEO. If your website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and provides a seamless navigation experience, you can avoid some factors that indicate that users aren’t finding your content useful, like high bounce rates and low time spent on your site.?

Funkhaus’ content team manages all these moving parts for our clients, creating high quality content that’s reflective of their identity while maximizing relevance to their audience. Need help understanding and implementing the content that works best for your brand? Email [email protected] to learn how our team can help.