Digital Marketing Manager Carl Banks explains why optimisation is so essential.
SEO is the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is required to help search engines index your site quickly and easily: this will also provide your users with a great experience using your site and encourage repeat visits.
When optimising your website, consider the following points to ensure your website has the best chance of ranking well.
Regular updates
Blogging is perhaps the most effective way to increase your organic site traffic. It lets you delve into more depth than your website allows and creates a catalogue of helpful content targeted for your area of expertise.
Use long-tail keywords
Use keywords that are specific to your product or service. Google and other search engines will then pinpoint your website as a key destination for that subject. This will then lead to your content receiving boosts in search rankings and help your customer to locate you.
Incoming links
Google prioritises sites which have plenty of incoming links, so encourage clients and partners to link to your site where possible. The more incoming links you can generate, the more important your site becomes in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Improve User Experience (UX) on web pages
When it comes to ranking your website on the search engine result pages, UX is one of the most critical factors. If you want to increase your online visibility and ultimately boost your conversion rate, you need to align your UX and SEO strategy.
High bounce rates usually result from poor usability and an awkward user experience. Unfortunately, it can be tough to pinpoint UX problems because they can vary from site to site. Using an optimisation program such as Crazy Egg can help to improve your user experience with impressive tools such as scroll maps, heat maps and many more. This is just one of many great optimisation tools available and it can really help to boost your user experience, which will, in turn, improve your SEO.
Speed up your site
In 2020, there’s a huge demand for speed. Over a decade ago Google included site speed as one of the all-important ranking factors. So, if your pages are slow, you’re doing harm to your organic listings, regardless of how beautiful and well thought out your site is.
Get rid of those non-essential elements that slow down your site and improve your user experience, so you can go forward with confidence that your keywords and content are performing to their maximum capacity.
Meta descriptions are important
A well-crafted meta description can have a huge impact and is usually neglected. Having the same meta description for a page talking about email marketing compared with a page talking about website design could get you penalised by Google. There’s a massive difference in the topics and your meta description should reflect this through a unique title and an engaging description of the content on the page.
The meta description is the first section that people see when Google serves up your page to search users, so get it right!
Ranking high in search engines is tough. If you’re struggling to get started with SEO or looking to build on an existing campaign, get in touch with us today and see how we can help you transform your brand.
