What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimisation, is about ensuring that your website appears on the first page of online searches. There are many factors involved, but good content, including keywords, are key to getting it right. Using the same keywords that your potential target market uses will ensure that you are found online for your products, services or information.
According to the experts, only 0.63% of Google searchers click on results from the second page. This is why SEO is so important. Ideally, it should be carried out as soon as your website goes live, however a later date is ok, but as soon as possible is better. Also, Google algorithms change over time, so re-assessing and tweaking SEO where necessary is advised on a regular basis too – at least 6 monthly.
As mentioned, there are lots of factors to SEO, but here I focus mainly on on-page SEO and how you can do most of them yourself.
SEO is part of web design, right?
Wrong! Sadly many web designers don’t offer SEO and some even think you don’t need SEO. You do! Google does automatically pick up information from your web pages, but if that info hasn’t been optimised, it won’t make sense. I see this time and time again.
So, if you already have a website, even if it’s just gone ‘live’, don’t assume that your website provider has applied SEO. The plugin may have been downloaded, but that alone won’t help. It won’t happen automatically. One way to find out is if you can see multiple results for your business on page one (search for the products or services you offer, not for your company name), congratulations you’ve made it! If you only appear once on page one, or not at all, there’s work to do.
Many things can be done to optimise a website for SEO. Here we concentrate mostly on on-page SEO, in other words, page and post content, images and keywords in meta information on search engine results.
If you’re not sure what keywords to use, carry out some competitor research, to see what those on page one of your search are using. You might find that the keywords you’re thinking of aren’t the same as what your target audience are searching for.
If your business relies on local traffic, for a specific town or region, SEO is important here too.
Seven ways to make SEO work for your business, free!
- SEO can be applied to WordPress, Wix, GoDaddy and Site 123 websites. (I have experience in all these if you get stuck!). Plugins only apply to WordPress but the rest is the same.
- Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is one of the best for the job – it uses a traffic light system that makes it easy to see at a glance if your pages are optimised or not.
- When you’ve tweaked your content and SEO, submit website sitemap using Google Search Console and to local directories such as – Yell and Cylex. There are also multiple paid opportunities online, some are better than others. Our local radio station is Ashdown Radio. They do charge to advertise and you can ask for a business listing in their directory, but the station is steadily growing.
- Register your business with Google Places for Business. Results always appear on page one of search results, together with your phone number and reviews. This is essential if your business relies on ‘local’ and it’s free!
- Optimise your website images.
- Add links to other websites where appropriate and if you can ask them to link back.
- Set up Google Analytics – it records data, so you can see how many clicks your website gets, how long they’re staying on there, where they come from, what pages they visit and the bouncerate. All this info will help to tell you whether your website content is good or not.
Conclusion
It can take time (sometimes weeks) for Google to ‘crawl’ your website. However, the quicker you apply SEO the better, then it’s ready to be ‘crawled’ and ranked. The more relevant your website keywords are to a potential search the more likely you will reach page one of search engines.
Google Places for Business (GMB) can take up to 3 weeks to show up online.
Other factors that will help your website be found online is linking back to it from, for example, social media posts, Linkedin and posting blog articles. Links, both incoming and outgoing, (links to your website from other highly ranked websites) also help your SEO.
If you don’t have the resources to do all the above, let me help!
Ask for your free SEO audit today or
