How to Improve SEO
No matter how beautiful your website looks, it won’t work for your business if no-one can find it.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a complicated process which ultimately helps you to be more visible online. While it can be a bit daunting, there are some steps you can take to improve your own SEO. Here are 5 simple steps to help you:
1. Understand what your customers are looking for
Before you start changing anything at all on your website, you need to know who your customers are, and what they are searching for online when they are looking for the product or service you provide.
If you haven’t carried out this market research yet, it’s definitely the right place to start. Specialist market research companies can be expensive if you’re on a tight budget, but you can use free tools like Survey Monkey to get valuable information from your existing customers and social media followers.
Build up a survey and find out:
- Buying habits of your customers
- What’s most important to them
- Why they are attracted to your brand
- What stopped them from making a purchase
- How they make decisions when buying from a new company
This information will help you to look at the inner workings of your business, realise the flaws, and rectify them so you can start attracting your ideal customers.
2. Carry out keyword research
Once you know who your ideal customers are and what they are looking for online, you need to carry out keyword research. Keyword research will tell you which search terms are popular and how much competition there is for those terms.
Please don’t ever assume you know what your potential customers are searching for on Google. Many business owners do this because they are too close to their business, but it’s pointless trying to optimise your website for terms that no-one is looking for!
Get a fresh perspective and carry out detailed keyword research using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner. These relevant keywords can then be worked through your website so you can be found by your customers at the exact time they’re looking for your product/service.
3. Write regular blog posts
Google loves fresh content. Writing regular blog posts is a great way to improve SEO. It’s also a great way to get useful content to your customers to keep them engaged.
If your social media is filled with constant sales posts, you will lose followers and engagement. However, if your social media is filled with links to useful content on your website such as how-to’s and self help articles, people will be much more likely to return to your site time and time again.
Write regular, helpful posts. Include the keywords you discovered during your research, but only aim to rank for one keyword per blog post though. Make sure you also write like a human too – the days of Google responding well to keyword stuffing are long gone!
4. Make sure your website has meta text!
Stay with me here. That’s not as complicated as it sounds. If you search for anything on Google, the results will show a title and description as shown below:
You need to make sure that each page and blog post on your website has the correct meta text so that the right information shows up when people are searching for your products/services online.
This little snippet is often the thing that makes people click through to your website (or not!) so it’s really important.
There are tools to help you with this, such as Yoast for WordPress, but if you’re struggling, we would be happy to do it for you.
5. Get a Google Business page & keep it up to date
I always encourage businesses to make sure they set up and manage their Google Business page. It’s a great way to help you stand out on Google and you can use it to gather customer reviews which will also improve your SEO!
Google Business is free and pretty simple to set up. You just need to spend some time getting the right information in there as it will be like a shop window for your customers and you want to draw them inside.
Need some help getting started? Let us carry out an SEO Audit for you.
Hopefully these 5 simple steps will help you to improve your SEO, but if you are still feeling unsure, if you have no idea how your website is actually performing, or you simply want someone to take all of this off your hands, get your SEO audit today.
Your SEO Audit will provide a detailed report including:
- Website errors
- Speed issues
- Broken links
- Backlinks
- Internal links
- Security issues
- Duplicate content
- Image issues
