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Tips to improve your SEO and rankings
Graeme Buckley • Jul 29, 2020
Get found higher on search engines
Want to get your website ranking better, higher, quicker, above your competitors? Of course you do, but how is this achieved?
Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it’s widely termed, can seem like something of an enigma to business owners wondering what they can do to get their websites more visible. While the world of SEO is ever-evolving, there are some fundamentals that hold firm.
To drive more organic traffic to your website and improve your rankings in the search engines with no risk of penalty, there are a few basic things you can do.
Website and Page Load Speed
You need to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible; page speed is a crucial factor for good SEO. Life has changed and where a slow load time a few years ago did not deter visitors, expectations are now far different and a slow-loading site is an absolute no-no in today’s marketplace.
A slow page will only frustrate a user and discourage people from using your site and ultimately from buying your product and service. A delay in page load time is proven to result in a significant loss in conversions.
Evidence shows that 40% of people abandon a website which takes over three seconds to load (eConsultancy). Of those people 80% will not return. That’s massive.
Site speed is one of the most important ranking factors – Google dictates this.
What this means is if your website pages are slow you are going to struggle big-time for organic listings, regardless of how good, cool and researched your content is or how snazzy or professional your website design.
One of the first things you may want to look at is image size and reducing them. Images can play a significant role in your site speed. They are often very large files which can slow down the load times of your website’s pages.
Remove all the non-essential elements that slow down your site, such as WordPress plugins, minimise and optimise everything on your site, look at reducing server response time, your hosting, browser caching, reduce redirects, run a compression audit and enable compression, prioritise over-the-fold content and monitor mobile page speed.
Link-building
Link-building from and to other websites relevant to your business and with relevant content is a great way to positively influence your website’s SEO. See it like a network of like-minded people and online ‘friends’. It can help build credibility and trust and add fuel to your SEO efforts. As with a friendship or network group, link-building is about quality not quantity. You’ll garner more trust.
Write authentic content for people
This may seem a strange thing to suggest, but if you have been reading content online over the years you will surely have come across the keyword and key phrase-stuffing technique whereby content writers and website owners try to play the SEO game by writing content featuring their products, services, locations and company name as many times as possible in the hope that it will pull them up the rankings. This may have fooled the search engines for a while, but it really is very bad practice and will not serve you well or win you any SEO points today.
Engaging, valuable content that focusses on your customers and your brand, product or service is the best way forward. Do not try to manipulate the search engines, or your customers. Write content for the user – they are the people who will engage with you and ultimately spend money with you.
Write content that is actually useful; this way you will gain more trust and credibility and build trust with your audience.
Use web analytics
Using web analytics such as Google Analytics will help you track your success and see where visitors to your site are clicking and how they move through your site and ultimately exit it. You can put this information to great use and modify and change your efforts to maximise return on investment.
Metadata, Metadata, Metadata
If you do anything on your site make sure you spend time on the Metadata and craft a Page Title, Description and some relevant Keywords for each page and blog on your website.
The Metadata for each page needs to be unique and relate to the information on that page. It will help the search engines deliver the very best match for a user’s search query and help get you found for your products, services, locations and company name.
Fail to do your Metadata and you are missing out on great SEO opportunities.
Check your URLs
A URL is a page’s unique address and you should ensure that you use readable and meaningful URLs that relate to each page. Use words that mean something to the search engines and users.
It’s always useful to remember that the search engines’ spiders that trawl the web are not human, they are bots and you need to keep things simple.
Don’t forget social in your SEO
Social media is important to SEO and can be used to engage with people and also draw people to your brand. Social signals can help your SEO and you should always be mindful of this.
Create content that people want to share, encourage people to share and build engagement.
Pictures are important too
Don’t forget to alt tag and title tag all the images you use on your website. It’s good to remember here that Google has an Image tab and features all images here. If you don’t alt tag and title tag each image you could be missing out on valuable SEO; the Google bots won’t know what your image is of if you don’t tell them in words. Keywords and phrases are as important when it comes to images; it’s more SEO juice. Again be authentic and relevant – no keyword stuffing, no game-playing.
Fresh, unique content
Content takes time to produce but it is well worth the effort when it comes to improving your rankings. Unique and engaging content is what users and the search engines want. The search engines want to give users the best, most relevant return on searches and if you produce fresh, unique content you have a greater chance of being in the mix.
Content marketing, when done well, can be a highly effective lead-generation tool.
We know there is a lot to think about when it comes to SEO; it’s always changing, even for us working in the industry.
Working with small to medium-sized businesses throughout the UK and as a Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Advertising Elite Channel Partner puts us in a unique position to assist you with not only SEO, but also web design, PPC, listings and social media.
If you feel you need help, would like a free one-to-one consultation, please get in touch now. Call us on 0800 089 0879.
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