Strategies for Marketing in the Wild: SEO Savannah

At A-Train, we like to picture the discipline called marketing as a physical landscape. Successfully promoting your organization requires feeling at home in the many areas of this environment.

What we sometimes refer to as the SEO Savannah is a particularly important setting. It’s a vast, open land filled with opportunity. However, if you aren’t trying to stand out from the herd, you won’t. Search engine optimization increases your visibility organically, so you don’t have to purchase as much media to get visitors to your website.

Speaking the Language of the Landscape

Whenever you visit (or revisit) a particular location on your marketing journey, it’s helpful to be fluent in the language spoken there.

On the SEO Savannah, that includes terms like:

• Sitemap – A simple description of the information on your website.
• Backlinking – Connections from other high-ranking websites that elevate your standing.
• SERP – A search engine results page.
• Keywords – Terms people use when searching for organizations like yours.
• Content marketing – The practice of improving your site’s ranking (and informing your prospects or clients) by publishing useful material.
• Keyword density – The ratio of keywords to other content on a page.
• Domain trust – Google and others use several metrics to determine your website’s trustworthiness.
• Meta descriptions – Short, enticing descriptions of what’s on a web page.
• Page load optimization – Ensuring your website comes up quickly when users visit it.
• Domain rank – A measure of how your website compares to others.
• Alt-text – Descriptions of the appearance or function of an image on a web page.
• Title tags – Code that identifies the title of a web page.
• Headings – Entries that break up text on a page, making it easier for search engines to understand the material.
• Traffic tracking – The practice of monitoring and understanding how a website is used.

If any of these words are unfamiliar, our team is happy to serve as your interpreter!

Putting It Into Practice

One aspect of SEO that you can easily assess is page load speed. Speed is a great survival tactic in the marketing wild. In fact, the top reason people leave a website is that it doesn’t load fast enough. Search algorithms care about this too.

Follow the steps below to perform a page speed test on your website and receive a report of items that need to be corrected.

1. Visit pagespeed.web.dev, enter your website URL (address), and click “Analyze.”
2. Record your mobile and desktop score.
3. Note your top opportunities for improvement.

There’s much more to SEO than page load speed, of course, but every improvement to your website makes it more likely your market will find you.

Another way to improve your SEO is to decide what keywords to target. Your website can’t be everything to everyone, so you need to narrow its focus to a few keywords. This will help you rank higher for those terms. As soon as you can, you should take a few minutes to decide which 3-5 keywords matter to you and ensure anyone creating content for your website knows them.