When it comes to digital marketing channels, SEO (short for search engine optimization) is the ultimate long game. Paid advertising will net you results in a matter of hours after the launch. With SEO however, it’s unlikely to have any visible impact in less than 3 months. Generally, you should expect to wait between 6 and 12 months until you get noticeable results. Among the benefits of SEO are scalability and moderate overhead expenses. In the long term, your leads from organic search results will be cheaper. In order to harness the power of SEO, you must understand that it’s a broad field usually divided into a few distinctive branches.
Technical SEO
This segment involves the technical aspects of your site’s performance. It deals with things like crawlability, site speed, mobile optimization, security, and structure.
Structure
The site’s structure is one of the first issues you should consider. A good structure is usually done as a plain, hierarchical tree. Your main page acts as an entry point that nests your core pages (like offers, “about us,” blog, etc). Each of these pages then has sub-pages (e.g. from the blog’s main page you can access your blog entries). A good structure will ensure easy crawlability (a search engine’s ability to “walk” through your site, and then display it later in the search results), a nice user experience, and easy management. A bad structure will set you up for a lot of trouble in the future. Tools like Ahref’s “Site Audit” can help you to visualize your current structure.
Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization should be among your top priorities in 2020. The majority of searches is done through mobile devices, and if your site’s visitors have a bad mobile experience, you’ll get penalized by search engines. Google’s Search Console can provide a relevant report to you, or you can use Google’s free tool to test how mobile-friendly your site is.
Indexability and Crawlability
Indexability and crawlability are vital to your website’s performance. As mentioned before, the site’s structure will affect its crawlability. Other important factors are your robots.txt file, sitemap, duplicate content, redirects, and interlinking. Tools like Semrush’s “Site Audit” or Google Search Console can help you identify your weak points, so you can deal with them one by one.
The thing about technical SEO is no matter how well your optimizations are, on their own they won’t make your site rank high. But optimization errors will ruin any chances to rank even for an otherwise perfect site. That’s why technical SEO should be among the first things you consider while embarking on a search engine optimization journey.
On-Page SEO
Unlike its technical counterpart, on-page SEO is more “down-to-earth,” and deals mainly with the content side of your site. Aspects covered under this category include keywords, title and tags, content, UX signals and more.
Keywords
Keywords are the heart of on-page SEO. Many principles and techniques from PPC research are applicable here too. A major difference between PPC and SEO is that you can reach popular paid search keywords, although you’ll pay more. But popular SEO keywords will most likely be out of reach for a long time. Top search spots are limited, and the waters of the World Wide Web are full of big sharks with years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of advantage over you. Because of this, you may want to go for long-tail keywords. They have a lower volume, but it’s easier to rank for them meaning more opportunities for your business.
To research keywords, there are many helpful tools from Moz, SEMrush, or Ahrefs. Usually, you’d want to include your keyword in the headline, title tag, description, and a few times within the text itself.
Title and Tags
Title and tags is a broad category encompassing the title tag, meta description, alt tags for images, and the proper use of HTML elements like H-tags. Skipping these usually won’t make a huge visual difference, but your ranking will suffer. There are many simple browser extensions that can help you find mistakes.
Content
Your content nowadays is more relevant than ever. You may be bored to death of saying, “content is king,” but let’s face it — it’s true. Avoid thin content (content which doesn’t provide any additional value, as it won’t rank properly), offer a unique perspective, and share new ideas. Write with your reader in mind, and be sure you’re not actively optimizing for SEO (see: keyword stuffing) at the expense of readability. Tools like Hemingway can help make your texts easier to read, which will in turn improve your rankings.
UX
UX, while not strictly a part of SEO, has an impact on a site’s performance. When creating your site be sure it’s easy to navigate, use accessible design, structure your text with subheadings, and don’t waste your above-the-fold space with enormous images. When it comes to using clear call-to-actions on your page, don’t be shy! They’re a great way to help visitors understand what you want from them.
Great on-page SEO will totally make your site rank higher, leading to more visitors and leads. It’s something that is (almost) under your full control, so it only makes sense to focus on optimizing your pages and site once you have the technical aspects down. Even better, things like meta descriptions and alt tags for images are quite easy to implement, leading to quick-wins for you.
Off-Page SEO
Last but not least, we have off-page SEO, which deals with actions you take outside of your website. The most important part of off-page SEO is backlinks, but it also includes things like guest posting and brand signals among others.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. Quantity and quality of backlinks is a major factor for search engines to determine how good your website is. Obtaining links from high-quality sites like Wikipedia or The Washington Post can provide a huge boost to your rankings. To get such links you’ll have to create unique, valuable content with high shareability. For example, you can cite your own data findings, provide your own unique insights, new facts, etc. Another approach is to engage in link building – a process of deliberately asking for backlinks, usually through some sort of outreach. While a time-consuming process, it could be especially beneficial in the long run. If you want to engage in link building, SEMrush has a convenient tool to support your efforts.
Guest Posts
Guest posts are a great way of generating off-site signals. You have to find relevant blogs and offer to write something for them. For example, you can find a successful local personal finance blogger and offer to write an article with tips about mortgage loans. This method is unlikely to generate a ton of direct referral traffic but it’s definitely good for SEO.
Brand Signals
Brand signals are another part of the equation. If your brand’s name gets a lot of search volume and is mentioned in publications (especially those of high quality), it will impact your rankings in a surprisingly positive way. Although social media marketing is a beast of its own, signals from social media can indirectly help you. By being shared via social media you increase people’s awareness of your brand. It’s likely they will search for your business at some point, strengthening your brand’s name.
Off-page SEO is a long and tedious process. You may be tempted to think that you can skip it, and in some situations, you certainly can. But it’s indispensable if you want to earn your spot on the search engine results page on the national scale.
Bonus Point: Local SEO
Local SEO is a subset of SEO that covers optimizations for the local search. It somewhat overlaps with our previous 3 points. But as a mortgage specialist, you’re very likely to operate locally, so we’ll cover it too. To succeed here you need to focus on listings and local citations.
Listings
Listings are vital to your local search performance. They allow people who search for keywords related to your business to see a convenient map marker, your phone number, and other basic info. Your first step should be claiming your Google My Business (GMB) profile, you can do it here. GMB is by far the most important listing, but it won’t hurt for you to do the same for Apple Maps and Bing Places. While creating these listings, be sure to stay consistent and enter the same info to avoid any future confusion and ensure solid rankings.
Local Citations
Local citations are your business entries in various aggregators and sites like Zillow. Tools like Moz’s Local Listing Score can help you find your local citations. After that, you should work to make your NAP (business Name-Address-Phone) consistent across all entries. Once it’s done, you can work to add your business to more listings. But remember — consistency is the key.
Performing just these two steps will put you ahead of many local competitors. If you’re keen on focusing on local search, consider review management too. Ask your past customers to write reviews for GMB. Those 5-star reviews won’t only make you look good, they will help your rankings.
That’s it for today. Despite the length of this blog, we’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg here. The scope of SEO is enormous but what we’ve covered today should be more than enough to get you started, and then the sky’s the limit. Have you done SEO in the past? What’s your favorite strategy?
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