Did you know that there are an estimated 5.9 million Google searches per minute across the globe? That translates to roughly 3.1 trillion Google searches per year. Given that Google is the most used search engine, it's mission-critical to ensure your website is equipped to capture this organic search traffic to help potential customers get to know your brand, products, or services. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring your website is designed to display as close to the top of a Google search page as possible. This makes it faster and easier for your target audience to engage with you, convert on an offer, or even complete a purchase. The question becomes: What can you do right now to help increase the SEO value of your website?

Here are a couple of practical, hands-on things  you can do right now to boost the SEO value of your website and help enhance the user experience of those who visit your site.

First things first: Conduct a SEO audit of your website

You can’t fix a problem without first diagnosing or understanding what the problem is, and conducting an SEO audit of your website will help you identify on-page and technical SEO issues that could be hampering your website’s ability to rank higher in organic search. 

There are a number of free online tools that crawl your website, identify SEO problems, and provide recommendations for how best to address these issues — tools like Semrush are a good place to start to get a better handle on your website’s potential SEO deficiencies. 

Not only can conducting an SEO audit of your website help reveal or clarify what is hampering your site’s organic search performance, it also can help you create a plan of action to address more common SEO issues, some of which we’ll cover in the rest of this blog. 

Optimize your page titles and meta descriptions

Website pages titles and meta descriptions — short summaries of each website page’s content that appear on a search engine results page (SERP) below the page titles — help a search engine better understand, index, and rank the information on your pages. 

Optimizing your website page titles and meta descriptions using targeted or relevant keywords can help your website’s click-through rate (CTR) by providing your target audience a clear look at the information on your website page and how that information can help them. 

The ideal meta description character count should be between 150 to 160 characters, and the ideal character count for page titles should be around 60 characters. 

Verify that you’re using high-quality images

High-quality images in the world of SEO doesn’t necessarily mean professional photography or artful graphics, though these things can help better engage your audience and increase the chance that they stay on your site longer. High-quality images in terms of optimizing your website for search means using images that: 

• Have appropriate alt image tags, which are brief descriptions of what’s depicted in an image that a search engine like Google can index and then return based on search inquiries
• Are titled and described using target or relevant keywords
• Are properly sized and compressed based on the template or theme of your website, as this will help increase page load speed

There are a number of free online tools to help you compress your image files — TinyPNG is a quick and easy tool that will compress a variety of image file types. 

Incorporate relevant keywords into your website copy

Incorporating relevant or targeted keywords — high search volume keywords that closely relate to your industry or products and services — increases the likelihood your website pages are returned based on specific customer inquiries. This also means it’s key to prioritize website copy that answers questions your target audience asks most frequently. 

How your website copy looks and is organized also factors into the SEO value of your site. Organizing your page into a content hierarchy using H1 and H2 tags helps Google better sort and return your website pages based on search terms, and this hierarchy also makes it easier for users to efficiently scan your page to find the information they want. 

Include video, images, or other dynamic types of content

One of the things Google looks at when ranking your website pages is the usefulness of your content. To help determine this, Google evaluates the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of your website pages, which the company refers to as E.E.A.T. 

While keyword-driven, relevant copy is important, more engaging or dynamic kinds of content like videos, images, charts, or other visual elements can help increase the value users get from your content. This can increase important data points like the amount of time users spend on your page or how many users bounce from your site to others. 

These tips will help you notch some quick wins in terms of increasing the SEO value of your website, but there’s much more to learn about how to optimize your website for organic search. Download our guidebook for more questions and helpful prompts for revamping your website. 

Shayne Terry is Managing Director, Content Strategy at Trekk, a tech-driven creative services agency based in Rockford, Illinois. With Trekk, she works on multi-channel campaigns for clients of all sizes, from family-run small businesses to global corporations.