What is it & how does it benefit your business?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. So what’s that?
SEO is the process that affects the visibility of your website or webpage in a search engines unpaid results, such as google or bing. So it’s a very important cog in your sales strategy and if done well, will support you to reach more prospects and generate more quality leads.
Search engine optimisation is broken down into two basic areas: on-page, and off-page SEO. For the purpose of this blog, we are talking about on-page optimization, which focuses on the elements that make up a website such as text content, and images.
Your eyes are probably beginning to glaze over by now, so here are 5 basic tips to get you started and improve the SEO of your website…without having to be an SEO whiz!
Quick tip before you get started: it is a good idea to set up a google analytics account to help you track any improvements in visitor numbers to see whether the SEO work you are doing is having a positive effect. Ask your web developer to help you do this if you don’t know how.
1. Content is king
Understand your customers and think about what they want to get out of your website. Produce useful and interesting content accordingly, for each page of your website. Ensure you focus on one keyword (see point 2 for help on this) per page, and then add 3 or 4 related keywords to improve the relevancy of that page to searchers and search engines.
It is important to remember that content doesn’t just mean text. The use of images, infographics, videos etc are just as critical in achieving SEO.
2. Use google’s keyword planner https://adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner
(A keyword is the word or phrase that describes the content of your website and helps search engines match you to relevant prospects searching for similar content.)
For prospects to find you through online searches, you need to ensure you naturally incorporate keywords in your page content to improve your visibility. Google’s keyword planner will help to give you ideas of popular keywords that people are using in search engines.
3. Internal linking
Creating useful links between pages helps users to navigate your site better, and stay on it for longer. It also helps you to spell out the importance of each page to search engines, thus improving search-ability.
4. Use a simple URL structure
You often see URLs that are full of random numbers and letters and bear no relevance to the content of the page. The easier a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. It’s as simple as that. Your web developer will be able to sort this for you quite easily, if you suffer from weird and wonderful URLs.
5. Don’t obsess over your ranking
It is important to remember that search rankings are fluid and can change according to the searcher’s location, device, search history etc. If you are just starting out with SEO, you’re best to focus on getting your website achieving the basics in terms of fresh content, relevant keywords, simple URLs and useful internal links, before you start getting caught up in rankings.
You can then start looking at your google analytics stats to understand how your website has improved. Have visitor numbers gone up, do they stay for longer, has your bounce rate gone down? If you can answer yes to those questions, then your SEO efforts are beginning to pay off. Especially if you are beginning to see more quality enquiries coming through via the website.