Making the most of SEO

You’ve got a great looking website that’s filled with information about your business. But how do you make sure that people can find your website? If it isn’t providing the leads or sales that you were expecting, search engine optimisation – or SEO – could be the missing ingredient.

A website is more than just a place to showcase what you sell. It’s also a great tool for increasing revenue. SEO can help you target the right audience and improve your website’s visibility, so more potential customers discover your business when searching for products or services online. In turn, this can help boost that all-important revenue.

How SEO helps

At its core, SEO helps improve where your website ranks in the search engine results pages (or SERPs), which appear when a customer types a query into Google. SEO focuses on organic results, rather than paid results – which are the ads that appear at the top of the SERPs.

Optimising your website and meeting the quality standards set by Google can boost the position of your website in the SERPs. And appearing higher up in the results means that more people are likely to find and visit your website.

It’s not just about getting your website seen by more people though. It’s also about getting the right people to see your website. SEO can help you target customers who are searching Google for the type of products and services your brand offers, so that these customers land on your website.

For example, if you sell campervans, it’s no good if your website appears in the search results for people looking to hire a campervan for a holiday. SEO helps to ensure that your website only appears in searches that are relevant to your brand, improving the quality of leads generated. It can be tailored to be highly specific to the products or services you offer.

What is your website for?

Before getting into the nitty gritty of SEO, consider the reasons behind having a website for your business in the first place. What goals are you aiming to achieve with this online presence? Is it a brochure to advertise your services? If so, SEO can be used to boost awareness of your brand. Is it a lead generation tool? SEO can help your website generate new, high quality leads. Is it an online shop? If you are selling products through an e-commerce website, SEO can increase revenue by generating online sales. Once you know what you expect your website to deliver, it will be easier to create a strategy for optimising your website.

Organic or paid?

Organic SEO is the process of optimising a website so it appears in the organic search results when a user types a relevant keyword or query into the search bar. Meanwhile, the results marked as ads which generally appear at the top of the page are paid advertising, or pay per click (PPC) results, which require a monetary investment.

Many businesses invest in both organic and paid SEO to maximise the visibility of their brand online. Paid advertising is also a useful tool when you are in the process of optimising the site, as it can increase quality traffic before the website begins appearing in the organic results.

How does SEO work?

Imagine the internet as an ever-expanding library: filled with billions of books, but with no filing system to help you find what you need. To make it easier for internet users to find what they are looking for online, Google uses software called web crawlers to explore the internet and discover web pages – including the pages on your website.

Crawlers browse these web pages to learn about the content of each website, gathering data that is then relayed to Google’s servers. This data is then organised and indexed – which is like creating a filing system for that growing library of books.

Now, when a user types a query into the search bar, Google can automatically sort through hundreds of billions of web pages to find the most relevant and useful result for that query. Just like a librarian picking out the perfect book.

By using technical, on-page, and off-page SEO methods, it is possible to tell Google what your website is about and why it should rank well in the SERPs. That means that when the web crawlers explore your site, they will understand exactly what your business offers and know what kind of search queries or keywords your website should appear for.

6 QUICK WINS TO BOOST SEO

There are many elements of a website that can be optimised to boost how it performs in the SERPs. Optimisation includes carrying out updates to the site, then monitoring its performance and making further changes informed by data. Here are six quick wins that could improve your site’s search rankings.

Fix duplicate content

All content on your website should be unique, meaning it doesn’t appear anywhere else on the internet. You should also avoid copying and pasting the same content across multiple pages. This is a common issue when using marketing text or product descriptions provided by a manufacturer. Always rewrite any copy in your own words before adding it to your website, and don’t be tempted to steal nicely-written text from other websites.

Optimise existing pages

Adding fresh content to your website regularly is one of the best ways to improve its performance in the SERPs, but optimising existing pages is important too, and a fast fix when you don’t have time to create new content. On each page, optimise title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, headers, and body content. This means ensuring that each of these elements includes the keywords or search queries that you are targeting, plus your brand name. 

Go mobile friendly

With more people than ever before using their phones to browse the internet, Google favours websites that are mobile friendly. Search for Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to see if your website makes the grade – and if it doesn’t, it’s time to invest in a mobile-friendly design. Most ready-made themes and templates created by companies like Wordpress and Wix are mobile-friendly as standard, or you could hire a web designer to craft a unique design.

Improve internal anchor text

Anchor text is the word or words that link to other pages on your website – like “read more” and “click here”. Instead of using these generic terms, make this anchor text relevant to your brand, which will help Google get a better idea of what each page is about. For example, “see our campervans” is better anchor text than “click here”, and can be easily changed for a quick win.

Maximise brand mentions

Links to your website are one of Google’s key ranking factors, which is why you may have heard of link building in the context of SEO. For a simple way to gain more links, set up a Google Alert to know when your brand is mentioned somewhere on the internet – like in a review or news story. If any of these brand mentions don’t link to your website, get in touch with the author of the content to ask them to include one.

Hiring a pro

The ever-changing nature of Google’s search algorithm and quality standards mean that, although SEO isn’t rocket science, it can be a full-time job. If you want to invest in getting SEO done right, research SEO agencies or professionals who can do the hard work for you and have a proven track record of delivering results for businesses like yours.

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