SEO should be a keystone of your website. Without good search engine optimisation, your site won’t be found by as many potential customers as it could be. It won’t appear as high in search engine results pages, which means that you get fewer clicks and fewer followers.
Regardless of what business you’re in, poor web optimisation could cost you a huge amount of money in lost business. Yet if you’re new to SEO, you may be wondering what search engine optimisation involves and what your SEO campaign needs. We’re here to show you how to do SEO optimisation and give you vital SEO tips that can give your site a big boost.
Good SEO strategies will result in more business and more eyes on your company. Is that an opportunity that you can afford to pass up?
Stick around and we’ll show you exactly what you need to be doing to improve your site’s SEO.
Start With the Fundamentals: Good Content
The very first part of your SEO strategy should be based around making your site worth your visitors’ time. If your site isn’t up to scratch, customers won’t stick around, your bounce rate will increase, you won’t get as many shares or backlinks, and your site will not convert customers who are on the fence.
There’s an old marketing saying that content is king. It’s still true to this day: solid content is the bread and butter of search engine optimisation.
Craft Your Content With Care
Writing blog content requires your utmost care. One way to make your content more compelling is to use the AIDA formula. This stands for attention, interest, desire and action. We used it in the introduction to this blog post and you’re still reading: it works.
Your introduction should first grab your reader’s attention: pose a problem or show them interesting statistics. Next, it should spike their interest: this is where you show how you can help to solve their problems.
Next, stoke desire in your readers: show them what they’d be missing out on if they pass up on reading your article or using your services.
End on a call to action: tell them to read on.
Be Original
Give your reader something that they’ve not seen before. Your site needs to tell them something that interests them. Parroting old facts or writing the same old content they’ve seen before will not endear them to you.
Use Images Wisely
A picture may not be worth a thousand words but a compelling image can make a writer click on an article. Use images wisely and you’ll get more and more readers clicking on your pages.
For more info on how to write excellent content, see this post on our blog.
Carry Out Keyword Research
Using keywords naturally is an essential part of search engine optimisation. Keywords are what determines whether your site shows up in the search results. For instance, if you are a coffee shop in Melbourne, using the keyword “Melbourne coffee shop” on your site will tell Google that you should show up in search results.
There are countless keyword research tools out there, including Ahrefs, SEMRUSH, and Google Keyword Planner. They all function in similar ways: you can see what keywords people are searching for and how difficult it will be to rank in searches for those keyword searches.
Choose your keywords wisely: you’re never going to the top result for some terms. For instance, if you target a competitor’s name as a keyword, you’re never going to overtake them. This would be very poor practice.
Instead, find keywords that strike a balance. Use keywords that are easier to rank for but that people still search for.
How to Use Keywords
Once you’ve got your keywords, what should you do? Should you jam keywords into every area of your site? No.
This is called keyword stuffing and is very poor practice in the world of web optimisation. This falls under the umbrella of “black hat SEO”, which is penalized by Google and can harm your ranking.
Use your keywords naturally. Include them a page’s SEO title and meta description, use them in headings, and sprinkle them throughout the page. Incorporate them into your writing in an organic way.
Speed Up Your Site
Site speed is one of the most important parts of SEO. If your site is slow, one of your SEO campaign’s goals should be to speed it up.
Google recently started recording site speed. Faster sites receive better rankings partly because of how they impact visitors to the site.
Imagine you have two sites that can give you the information or products that you need. If one takes an age to load and the other is snappy, which will you use? Slow site speed increases bounce rate and can result in a significant drop in your site’s rank.
What can you do to make your site more responsive?
Choose the Right Hosting Provider
You need to choose a hosting provider that will give you enough bandwidth for your needs. If you don’t have enough bandwidth, your site can become congested and slow.
Avoid shared hosting if you can too. If you’re on the same server as a bunch of other websites, they could be using valuable CPU power and memory, draining the resources available to you.
Opt For a Minimalistic Web Design
If your web design is too complicated, it will take longer for your site to load. Opt for a website design that is minimalistic and responsive: these will load faster and improve your site’s speed.
We recommend getting your website professionally designed, rather than doing it yourself.
Compress Images
If you are asking your audience to load an uncompressed image that measures in megabytes rather than kilobytes, your site will be slower. Display compressed, smaller versions of images that are still crisp. This gives you the benefit of having high-quality images on your site without slowing it down.
Don’t Neglect Your Mobile Site
In recent years, Google has started to put a priority on how websites perform on mobile. Under their mobile-first indexing, how your site performs on mobile devices is more important than how it performs on PCs.
In the past, mobile sites tended to play second fiddle to their desktop cousins. As such, their design was not as important and was often neglected by amateur designers.
Today, you cannot afford to do this. Never attempt to shoehorn a badly-scaled version of your desktop site onto a mobile device and call it quits.
You need to put as much effort into your mobile site, if not more than you put into your desktop one. This isn’t only an SEO tip, either. According to recent statistics, nearly three-quarters of all internet users are predicted to be on mobile devices by 2025: don’t neglect these potential customers.
Build Backlinks
Backlinks should be a crucial part of your web optimisation strategy. Backlinks are, at their most basic level, links placed on other websites that connect to your own. These incoming links serve a huge number of purposes.
Most importantly, they are the most important way that search engine’s crawlers find your website. They’re like a road map, directing the search engine to your site. If you don’t have any backlinks, it will take longer for your website to be found.
They also offer a boost to your website’s authority. The more backlinks you have from reputable sources, the more respected your site becomes. Google notices this change and will boost your rank in search results in turn.
They also bring in more potential customers to your site. The more ways there are for people to find your site, the better it will be for you.
Never Rest On Your Optimized Laurels
Your SEO strategy needs to be proactive, not reactive. Web optimisation is not a process that you can do once and then never touch again. Your site needs to adapt over time.
SEO is a field that changes all the time. What was once good advice is now disregarded. Google’s algorithm changes constantly as their engineers refine it.
We must all follow in the wake of the algorithm: keep up to date with the latest news on any changes that are made and adapt your site’s approach so it’s always current and following SEO best practices.
It’s a lot of work but it’s worth it.
Need Some Help With Search Engine Optimisation?
We know that managing your site’s SEO can be a difficult task. Enlisting the help of professionals can boost your site’s rank and authority, potentially leading to more business and more money in your pocket.
If you’re considering hiring professionals to help you with search engine optimisation, consider our services. We’re experts in web design, digital marketing and love helping businesses reach their full potential. For more information about our services and rates, please get in touch with us. We’d be very happy to hear from you.
