Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) increases the visibility of your website in organic search engine results pages (organic results being those which you haven’t paid the search engines to display on your behalf, such as adverts). Optimising your site so that it is relevant for a user’s search intent means helps to generate quality traffic. That is traffic that wants to click through and, ultimately, complete an action you have defined as a business goal e.g. product sales. With over 90% of online experiences starting with a search engine, your business ought to be doing everything in its power to appear at the top of prospective customers’ searches. Increasing traffic to your website is a prime way to increase brand awareness and revenue, so if you want to appear on more people’s screens, it’s time to make a conscious effort to improve your SEO. Do you need help with your SEO? Read on, to learn ways to take your SEO to the next level.
Related: What is SEO? And How Does it Work?
8 Steps To Take Your Search Engine Optimisation To The Next Level
Here’s our advice on the steps to take to improve your SEO:
- Do your keyword research
- Publish relevant quality content
- Use headings to their full advantage
- Use alt tags on your images
- Start blogging
- Incorporate metadata
- Make your website mobile-friendly
- Improve your page loading speed
Do Your Keyword Research
SEO keywords and long-tail key phrases are used to increase relevant organic search traffic. Your keywords should be relevant to your business. It should also consider what your target audience is typing into the search bar. Say for example you are a wholesale florist – as much as you’d like to rank for the keyword “flowers”, you’re likely to do much better using long-tail keywords. Think of phrases aligned with your prospective customers’ search queries such as “wholesale roses London” or “bulk buy florist supplies”. Remember that first and foremost, your website should be readable, incorporating keywords naturally within the text. Keyword stuffing will no longer go unnoticed by the Google algorithm. You could risk being removed from the search engine results pages altogether!
Publish Relevant Quality Content
You want your website to be a success with high traffic volumes and a great click-through rate (CTR), right? So, you need to give visitors a good reason to keep coming back. Keeping your content relevant, up to date and interesting is important, as high-quality content is also more likely to increase “dwell time”. That’s how much time people spend on your website per visit and it can have an impact on your SEO ranking.
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Use Headings To Their Full Advantage
Headings not only break up your content, making it easier to read and therefore improving the user experience on your website, but they can help with SEO too. By optimising your header tags for long-tail key phrases and then answering a query directly below, you may get your article featured in detail at the top of the search engine results page. Using subsequent H2 and H3 headings also gives Google the tools it needs to create its own bulleted lists which show up as featured snippets.
Use Alt Tags On Your Images
Alt-text is essentially the words that sit behind a picture on your website. It provides image descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly. This text is also a great opportunity to include descriptive keywords to help with SEO. If for example, you had a picture of a dog modelling a harness, you could include descriptive text such as “Labrador wearing a pink harness with pockets”. If you are selling a dog harness where the unique selling point is that it has pockets, you’ve just given Google another reason to rank your webpage for such queries by including the phrase “harness with pockets” for that image.
Start Blogging
Your website doesn’t have to BE a blog to HAVE a blog and you might be surprised to learn how many businesses have an area of their website dedicated to regularly uploading long format informative content. Blogs are a great way to incorporate those all-important keywords into your website as well as increase “dwell time” which, as mentioned previously, positively impacts your search engine ranking.
Incorporate Metadata
When building your website, each page has a space between tags for describing the contents of your page – this is metadata and it shows up on the search engine results page beneath the URL and page title. Front-load your keywords here and remember to keep it to less than 160 characters. The text should be concise, relevant and appealing enough that people want to click the link to find out more.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
User experience plays a huge role in conversion success. So you’re going to want to reduce any friction when it comes to the way customers view your website and be warned; Google will know if you haven’t taken this into consideration! A significant proportion of web visitors access the internet from smartphones and tablets nowadays. Testing the functionality and formatting of your website across different types of devices is essential.
Improve Your Page Loading Speed
Slow webpage loading speeds lead to an increased abandonment rate. Features such as plug-ins, pop-ups, and video streams may help to emphasise your message. It can also encumber the page load time. It’s understood that when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of visitors leave before taking further action and a huge 80% won’t return. Google’s algorithm will recognise your website’s popularity (or lack thereof) and adjust your search ranking accordingly.
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We’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation and there are many more things to consider such as Social Media integration, location marketing and link building that all feed into improved SEO for your website. With over 25 years of experience, AIM Internet can help you. AIM Internet can help to turn your website into a lead producing machine through the power of SEO. Interested in working with us to develop your search engine optimisation strategy? Call us today or email info@aiminternet.co.uk
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