Finding your content in a good place on Google search results may seem like a daunting task, with so much competition these days, ever changing tactics, trends and so much noise online, it can be difficult to know where to start.
However, it doesn’t have to be such a challenge, there are many easy SEO strategies to follow when optimising your website.
In this post, we will highlight some simple strategies to follow to help your website drive traffic and improve its ranking on search engine results pages. SEO stands for search engine optimisation and helps to organically increase the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through search engine result pages. The main goal of SEO is for searchers to end up clicking on your different pages from a search engine.
Create relevant and authoritative content
Creating authoritative and high quality content is the best way to increase your search engine rankings, especially when linking to SEO marketing.
Quality content should be relevant to your target audience and offer value to them and give them a reason to want to know more. Google processes 40,000 search queries every second, a crazy amount of searches. Therefore, it’s so important that you do what you can to appear in front of those searchers and optimising your content with SEO is a great start.
Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, so keeping up to date with these will ensure you are on top of your game. As a rule of thumb, your content should be:
– Informative and useful: for example if you are building a site for a hairdresser, this should include the location, opening times, services, a blog, upcoming events and contact information.
– Offer value: the aim is to add as much value to your target audience as possible, to ensure they keep coming back to you instead of competitors.
– Credible: original research, testimonials, links and reviews are great ways to boost credibility and trustworthiness.
– High quality: all content should be of high quality, unique and specific to your brand and audience, this will improve the user experience and in turn also rank higher in search engines.
– Engaging: to truly grab a reader’s attention, the content should be engaging, this includes the layout, design, text and images.
Optimising content is crucial in ensuring your content is audience-centric, as well as performing well in search engines. This includes adding meta descriptions, meta titles and keywords. Continue reading this blog to find out why optimising your website with keywords is a simple SEO strategy to follow…
Keyword research
Once you have determined the topic of your content and who it will be targeting, then you can begin to focus on keyword research. Keywords are a big factor when it comes to search engine optimisation and improving your ranking. They are the link between the content you have provided and what people are searching for.
The goal of ranking is to drive traffic to your site from SERPs and the keywords chosen will help to determine the type of traffic you receive. It’s important to be specific with your keywords in order to drive traffic that will convert into leads. For example, if you own a golf club and are trying to rank for the words “clubs”, instead of guiding those who are interested in golf clubs to your site, you may in fact get those who are interested in nightclubs and therefore will not convert into a customer.
To create content that organically ranks well and drives traffic, you will also need to understand the needs of your visitors, their interests, type of content they seek and language they use. Keyword tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs are great for researching terms and phrases.
Long tail keywords are more specific searches and keywords, able to help you reach your organic traffic goals with less searches but more intent via niche topics. Short-tail keywords often have a higher search volume, but are also more competitive. So having a mixture of the two can form a great strategy. The complexity and constantly evolving nature of keyword research can make it challenging for website owners. By hiring an agency that offers keyword research services, website owners can save time and effort while maximizing the effectiveness of their SEO efforts.
Make sure you are not keyword stuffing your content, as this can actually backfire and negatively impact your rating score. Instead use a combination of keywords with each page uniquely targeting a primary keyword.
Update content regularly
We all know that content is key and is a big factor when optimising your website, the content creation process never stops. It’s a given that behaviour is constantly changing for searchers and buyers, so your content should too reflect this change. A lot has happened in the past few years so content that served your audience in the past, may not necessarily serve them now, so it’s important to keep up with the times.
When content is updated regularly, it is a great relevancy indicator and a sign to move up in ranking on the search engine results pages. Creating new content is always great, but don’t forget that even just updating old content can do wonders for your SEO strategy. Refreshing your content with updated information, keywords, links, mobile compatibility and new statistics not only saves you time and resources, but also builds trust between your business and customers.
When you update your existing content, Google will crawl your site more often, meaning it’s more likely that your posts and site information will show up when your audience is doing research. Your content will be seen as more appealing to both Google crawlers and anyone reading your blogs or web pages. This also helps to build domain authority and gives an advantage when it comes to search engine results rankings. Save time, resources and increase traffic, it’s a win-win really.
Use alt tags
Alt text helps to improve SEO and the accessibility of your site. Adding images to your website is a good way to engage visitors and boost your ranking.
Alt tags help to strengthen the message of your site with search engine spiders because it provides context to the image, allowing the crawlers to effectively index an image. Not only that but if you do not set alt tags then this can massively decrease your ranking, so always make sure you do this and include one keyword to describe the image shown.
Keep your site at a healthy speed
Another factor when optimising your website with SEO is ensuring your page speed is quick. A slow page may put people off from spending time on your site and purchasing from you, instead, they may leave the site and visit a competitor instead. This is a negative to crawlers too and your site inevitably won’t rank highly.
SEO may seem complicated, however it does need to be. Following a few easy strategies when optimising your website will increase your search engine page rankings and traffic to your site.
The more relevant leads you get to your site, the more likely it is that they will turn into loyal customers. Firstly, understanding who your target audience are will help you create relevant and unique content that will sit on your site to engage customers. SEO is crucial to make your website visible and create opportunities, will you follow the above strategies and boost traffic?
