The vast majority of affiliates rely on SEO traffic to drive visitors to their sites and to generate those all-important clicks, conversions, and FTDs.
But meeting the ranking guidelines set by Google and other search engines is no mean feat – ranking factors change all the time and as do the most effective SEO techniques and practices.
In this article, we’ll highlight the top five SEO factors that you should prioritize today in order to better optimize your website.
Page Speed
Have you ever clicked on a page you found on Google, only for the website to take ages to load?
How long did you wait before closing the tab and going somewhere else?
If your page loads slowly, users will do the exact same thing to your website – and they probably won’t trust you so much in the future.
Generally speaking, your pages should load in two seconds or less.
User Experience (UX)
Google prioritizes user experience above most other ranking factors. Your website must be user-friendly, and you’ll need to consider several areas if you want to achieve this.
UX aspects you must think of when designing your website include, but are not limited to:
- Your website’s branding; can people tell what you’re about?
- Easy to use; can visitors find what they need without running into difficulties?
- Responsiveness; do your pages not only load correctly and continue to work without issues for the entire journey?
Asking yourself these three questions will give you a head start and enable you to satisfy your users’ needs easier.
Content
Even if you get the user experience of your website spot on, you must also ensure that your content is of the highest standard. Everything you post must answer the questions and solve the pain points that visitors will be searching for.
When creating content, it’s also crucial that you fact-check everything. Grammatical errors can impact your credibility, too, and you should ensure that you capture all possible mistakes before publishing.
Google loves fresh content, so it’s a good idea to regularly update posts on your website.
Author Pages
As your brand grows, you’ll probably need to hire a team of writers. And as part of their onboarding process, it’s wise to create author pages so they can publish their work under their names.
Beyond giving your website a little more personality, you can use author pages to let the writers demonstrate their expertise. While Google says that author expertise is difficult to determine, it’s possible that having knowledgeable writers will impact your search rankings.
Authority
If you want your website to rank well on Google in the long run, you need to build up a good level of trust and authority. You can’t expect this to happen straight away, but you can take several steps to ensure that you achieve this in the long term.
Factors that will determine authority include:
- Credibility of content
- Domain authority
- The originality of your content
These are just five ways you can help to improve site rankings and drive that all-important SEO traffic to your website.