Diving deep into website optimization with Merrygood’s Nicole Fikes

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been chatting with agency friends and partners across the media and marketing spheres to bring you some highly relevant, boots-on-the-ground insight on major trends and market developments. Today’s tips come courtesy of Nicole Fikes, the founder and creative director of Merrygood, a full-service creative agency based in Austin. At Merrygood, Nicole has created a way to put that big brand experience to work helping companies of every size, in every industry, tell their stories beautifully and strategically. Focusing on strategy, digital and creative services, Merrygood has worked with the likes of B2B and consumer brands including Indeed, Tiff’s Treats and JuiceLand.

Quality backlinks really matter when it comes to your SEO. A backlink is when another site includes a link back to your site, introducing new traffic streams. PR wins get your company name and website link on other publications, thus upping your domain authority rating.

PR can also increase direct searches for your brand, which helps your authority rating. Of course, the quantity of users clicking those backlinks and searching for your company matters greatly, so the bigger the win, the bigger the SEO boost.

You can really do double duty on these. For example, if the Austin Business Journal publishes a piece that includes a backlink to your website, you should also have a press page on your site that publicizes the win. Make sure your main headline includes descriptive keywords. This won’t flip the script on your ranking overnight— SEO is a long game—but following best practices like this can only help you.

I asked Adrienne Foreman, general manager of StrongPages and our SEO partner, to speak to the wins she’s seen.

“One of the current wins I’m seeing is related to a medical supply company I work with. They are getting a lot of attention for the COVID-related products they’ve made. Although the team I work for is a cardiovascular team that is unrelated to the COVID products, I do expect a pretty decent authority boost from the attention that should be sustained long-term. More people know the brand than ever before even though they’ve been a large medical supply company for a while.”

Before you start churning out loads of content, you first want to know what people are searching for. I highly recommend working with an SEO specialist to draft a keyword list. They’ll be able to identify relevant search terms with lower rates of competition. Meaning there are fewer companies jockeying for position if someone searches that particular term. Once you’ve identified those keyword opportunities, draft content that allows you to use them naturally. It’s especially important to use keywords in headlines, as search engines see this as a key indicator to the page’s content.

Besides integrating keywords into your headlines, work with a developer to make sure your headlines are tagged as an H1. Visually they may be the biggest words on the page, but the H1 tag is what search engines look for.

You can also work with your developer to ensure you have meta descriptions on all your pages. A meta description is a 155-character snippet that describes what the page is about. Search engines will show it as part of a search result, but they also use it to determine if the page is relevant to a user’s search terms. Thus, the use of keywords and phrases are vital here as well.

You also want the meta description to be well written and entice a user to click, so there’s a balance. The more times your link is clicked from a search result, the more it’s considered a good result and will move up in the rankings.