If you want to succeed in an online business, you need to know your SEO. Understanding how SEO works and using it properly will help drive traffic to your website and increase brand awareness as well as conversions. To do this, you’ll need to observe and emulate what your competitors are currently doing with SEO, but also have a different mindset.
It’s possible for you to achieve better rankings than them with the right amount of effort and an on-point strategy. Even if you’ve just recently created a website and are new to the world of SEO, this article will help you get on the right track to getting discovered online so you can gain clients!
Here are our top ten effective SEO hacks to improve your ranking as an animator.
1) Use Relevant Keywords
When creating content for your website, make sure that you add relevant keywords to the text that you want to rank with on Google. According to Backlinko, where you use your keywords is just as important as the number of times you use your keywords.
Where are the right places to include your keywords? Google prioritizes keywords in your website URL, title, meta descriptions, headings, and body text. Using keywords in these places will increase click-through-rates for your post and eventually boost your Google ranking.
For example, if you are writing about 2D animation in your blog post, make sure that you optimize your blog post around the keyword “2D animation”.
2) Use a Keyword Research Tool
Once you have all your relevant keywords on your website, enter those terms into keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console.
Keyword research tools allow you to find short-tail and long-tail keywords related to your original keywords. You’ll see what topics have attracted a lot of backlinks within the animation industry.
According to LCN, short-tail keywords are general search queries that consist of 1-2 words while long-tail keywords have 3-5 or more words. People enter short-tail keywords into a search engine when they look for information about a general topic. On the other hand, if they want more specific information, they will type more words into a search engine.
If you rank low for some keywords that you want to rank higher for, rework your animation blog or website content. For example, you can write a blog post about closely-related keywords in areas that your competitors rank high. If you’re going to try to compete with others in a direct way, though, you need to be sure that your content is ten times better than that of your competitors.
3) Create Evergreen Content
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Evergreen content is any content that will remain relevant, useful, and informative to your target audience over time.
This kind of content is what you want your audience to see when they look for relevant keywords. Singlegrain suggests that you promote your evergreen content on your sidebar in your animation blog or website. This is a great way to get your content seen since it will be shown on every page of your blog.
4) Write Long Content
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Backlinko suggests that long content can generate more backlinks than blog posts with short content. This means that if you want to have better Google rankings and website traffic, you will need to write longer (and better) content.
Neil Patel, the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and New York Times bestselling author, confirmed this idea. He said that his posts with more than 1,500 words received almost twice the amount of social shares compared to the ones below 1,500 words.
That being said, if you don’t have the time and energy to write 1,500-2,000-word blog posts, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write anything at all. Quality is still better than quantity.
Something important that you should keep in mind is that when you write a blog post, you want to cater to your reader and give them the information they came to find Don’t just add words to a page just to have words. There may be people who won’t read your full blog post and only want the essential information.
If your audience likes what they see and find it helpful, even if they read only a small portion of your blog post, they will keep coming back to your website to see if you can provide them with more helpful content.
5) Do Not Underestimate Internal Linking
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According to Mangools, 30 SEO experts suggested that SEO beginners take advantage of internal linking. Internal links are backlinks from other pages of the same website.
Internal linking helps Google crawl through and rank your pages and help visitors easily find content on your website. According to an Oncrawl study, pages with more internal links get crawled more often.
Whenever you have new content, make sure you link your relevant pages to each other. Link new pages to old pages and vice versa when necessary. Soon enough, you will be able to see major improvements in your rankings.
6) Link Posts to Authoritative Websites
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In order to improve your SEO, you need to share other people’s content too. Doing so will direct your readers to other relevant sources for additional information. While it may seem counterintuitive to send your readers to another website, it’s actually great for your SEO. Linking to outside content shows Google that your site is credible and that the quality of information on it is high.
Aside from the SEO benefits, your outbound links will help you create connections with other authoritative websites and bloggers. If they appreciate you sending website traffic to them, they just might do the same in return, especially if your content is relevant to the content they put out.
However, even if they don’t reciprocate, outside links will increase your chances of success if you ask them to publish your guest post and link to your website in the future. This will eventually boost your page ranking on Google.
7) Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
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It’s not enough for your animation blog or website to look good on a monitor. You should also make it responsive across all devices, especially cell phones, or else your mobile visitors will leave.
The majority of online searches and half of online purchases are done on mobile. 77% of Americans own a smartphone and 60% of daily searches are now done on mobile. This is why it’s more important than ever before to make your animation website perform well on mobile devices.
8) Leverage Infographics
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Infographics are great to use because they can contain so much information in just one image. Studies show that an infographic is 30x more likely to be read than an article full of text.
According to Neil Patel, you have to learn how to leverage advanced animated infographics. He says it’s his secret weapon to doubling traffic for his clients. By adding gifs into your infographics, you will also get a lot of backlinks and social shares.
9) Improve Your Page Speed
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Another effective way to improve your Google rankings is by improving the speed of your website pages.
If your website pages load slowly, it may be due to your use of too many plugins and extensions. If you have plugins and extensions that are rarely used and don’t make a significant change to your website conversions, you should delete them.
Aside from checking your extensions, you should also check your image sizes. Images take up a lot of space and may take the longest time to load. On average, images make up more than 20% of the size of a website.
Cognitive SEO says that pages that load slowly may make a negative impact on your conversions. Make sure that you compress and optimize your images without decreasing the image quality.
You can use WordPress plugins such as Smush or ShortPixel to compress your images. Optimizing your image size can greatly influence your page speed, improve user experience, decrease bound rate, and increase your rank on Google.
In Closing
Ranking higher on Google is all about improving your SEO by improving your website user experience and putting out quality content that’s relevant to your target audience. If you give your audience what they are looking for, then they will keep coming back to your website.
Improving your SEO can be a challenging process and requires a lot of effort.However, it’s well worth the work. If you implement these simple but effective hacks, you can look forward to great results for your animation website and a higher ranking on Google.
If you are looking for ways on how to gain animation clients and become a successful animator, make sure you watch our free masterclass and download a copy of our free marketing handbook.
