In our previous post, we focused on the important role that technical integrity plays in search engine optimization (SEO). Technical integrity includes the various behind-the-scenes tactics that support your website’s search engine visibility.

Technical maintenance should be implemented on an ongoing basis to ensure your website is easily crawled by search engines. With this deliverable in place, a first-rate Atlanta SEO company will establish relevance on your website on a page-by-page basis.

Relevance is the second pillar of an effective SEO strategy. Here’s an overview of this vital component of SEO.

How Keyphrases Demonstrate the Relevance of Your Website

Search engines function by leading their users to the answers they’re seeking based on search terms. That means the content on your website must answer the consumer’s question both in the way they want to receive the answer and in a way that can be understood by search engines.

This is where keyword research comes in. Keyword research identifies the terms and phrases consumers are using in their search queries. In order to rank for a keyphrase or search term, there has to be a page on your website that includes those words and answers the consumer’s question.

Keyphrases are gathered from your business’s website, industry, location, and products or services offered. When included in engaging content, strategic keywords can increase page relevance, moving you up in search results.

An experienced SEO company will devote a significant amount of time to researching and building a keyphrase strategy to ensure the content on your website is relevant to what the user is searching for. This is important, because while ranking number one for a keyphrase is valuable, it’s a hollow victory if no one is searching for that term.

SEO Techniques that Show the Relevance of Your Website

There are other important SEO techniques that help to demonstrate the relevance of your website to user search queries. These include content audits, page optimizations, and image alt text.

Content Audit

Performing a content audit identifies if the content on your website is being leveraged appropriately based on ranking factors and consumer search queries. A content audit will answer questions like:

• Is the target keyword included and properly placed within the content?
• Is the content on your website insightful and answering consumer’s questions about the target concept?
• Does content on your site naturally lead to other articles or pages to promote the best path to conversion?

Reviewing landing pages and blog posts with these questions in mind and making necessary adjustments can help to significantly improve your placement in search results.

Page Optimization

Website landing pages are optimized by ensuring that key elements speak to what the page is about, which supports both user experience and search engine crawling. These elements include URLs, navigation menus, meta descriptions, title tags, and headers.

If these elements of your website content don’t relate to the identified target keyphrase, it can hurt your rankings on search engine results pages. At the same time, stuffing a page with the same keyphrase over and over is a surefire way to see your page ranking drop. In short, you want to make that these elements speak clearly and succinctly to the specific page’s main concept.

Image Alt Text  

When properly optimized, images can send important signals to search engines about the relevance of your page. But your images won’t count in search engine results unless you add searchable alt text in the back end of your website. Image alt text tells search engines what the image is about and how it relates to user search queries.

A key tip to optimizing images well is remembering that alt text was developed as assistive technologies. In other words, imagine you were describing the image to someone with impaired vision – that’s the kind of description you should include in your alt text.

Establishing and strengthening your website’s relevance to search engine queries is a key component of SEO along with technical integrity. In the final part of this series, we’ll explore the role of authority in SEO.

Contact Blueprint today to get started increasing your business’s relevance to consumer queries and visibility in search engine rankings.

By: Blueprint