Your primary motive as a business owner is to direct as much traffic as possible through to your website to initiate the sales process. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the core of success when it comes to achieving a high ranking on Google—without breaking the bank. If you’re unfamiliar with the incentive behind SEO, it’s basically a way to target keywords (related to your products and services) that people are likely to search. Google will rank your website based on its relevancy to the keyword, and the overall credibility of the website. That’s why it’s important to implement the right SEO techniques to reap a better reward!
Your credibility score will be determined by a number of different factors. Google will pick up the amount of time people spend on your website (or the bounce rate), broken links, and any internal or external links that connect you to other websites that have a high domain authority (DA). There can be a bit of technical work associated with achieving good SEO results, so you might need to seek out some help from an SEO company to tick off each of the components on our list! Here are some top tips:
- Ample Keyword Research: Targeting the right keywords is key to achieving good SEO results. It comes down to the niche of your business, your target audience, and the level of competition you’re up against. We recommend using a combination of both short, and long-tail keywords. Short tail refers to the broader, more generic search terms (e.g. plumbing Adelaide), whereas long term keyword usually consists of three or more words to narrow down the search to more specific services (e.g. leaking tap repairs Adelaide). There are plenty of websites you can use to track the search volume of keywords, like SEMrush, and an SEO company will have access to a range of other tools to help you keep up with the competition.
- Optimizing Content: Your content will effectively make or break your SEO. Your SEO company needs to focus on structure, clarity, and targeting the right keywords on your service pages to boost the likelihood of Google recognizing the relevance of your keywords. There are certain writing guidelines you can use to optimize your content even further like using active voice, keeping sentences below 20 words, and limiting paragraphs to 150 words. For more information, we recommend using the Yoast plugin which gives you a readability score and outlines how you can make improvements.
- Easier Navigation: Make sure that your website easy to navigate; enabling users to switch from page to page seamlessly. Not only will this create a clear sales pathway to prompt your audience to contact you, but it will keep visitors on your website for a longer period of time which influences the credibility rating of your website.
- Boosting the Speed of Your Website: Loading speed is important because people are impatient. The data shows that a loading speed of any more than 3 seconds can have a drastic impact on audience retention! Loading speed is impacted by a number of things like the size of your images and video files (which can be compressed), your web hosting company, and implemented plugins.
- Using Header Tags: Leading search engines like Google emphasize the importance of keyword-rich header tags on your website. Make sure your SEO company uses the appropriate header formatting and incorporate your targeted keywords where possible to drive results.
- Utilizing Images & Videos: Images, as well as videos, are known to enhance the overall user experience whilst retaining the attention of your target audience. By editing the alt-tags of the images, you can double the SEO benefits by incorporating your selected keywords.
- Improving the Design & Layout of Your Site: Visual impact is vital to keeping your customer engaged. Try and incorporate interactive features and prompt the web-user to scroll through your content by extending the layout of the home page with a brief overview of the entire website, with links directing them to information they can find on other pages for simple navigation.
- Mobile Optimization: With the growing number of smart-phone users comes the necessity of responsive design. You want your website to be accessible, appealing and fully-functional on all devices! An SEO company will generally take care of this as part of your web design package.
- Installing Social Sharing Buttons: The more exposure you get, the more incoming traffic you will have. There are various plugins you can download that support and prompt sharing on social platforms like Facebook for greater online exposure. Google will reward this with better SEO results!
- Maintaining Backlinks and Internal Links: In short, backlinking is where another website includes a link to your website somewhere within their content. This is particularly effective if the website has a high DA—a score that Google gives you for the overall credibility of your website. Alternatively, you can also incorporate internal links within your own content to establish this connection, so long as you don’t divert people away from your own website.
We hope you find these tips useful when implementing SEO into your marketing strategy!
