SEO Top Tips – Don’t forget your audience!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a phrase you’ve most likely heard of before. You know it’s important, but as to where to begin with improving SEO on your website… well, that’s why you clicked on this article. Welcome. Let us gently guide you through some SEO top tips to help improve your organic search ranking!
The basics – What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO is the practice of increasing your website’s traffic, by improving organic search engine rankings. Organic search listings are earned based on your SEO quality score, whereas sponsored listings, such as Google PPC (pay per click), are paid for listings.
Although PPC advertising has its advantages, it’s vital to work on your organic search rankings alongside PPC to boost your website’s overall performance.
All clear so far? Let’s get to work on improving your SEO!
Content consistency is key
Firstly, regular, informative content can go a long way to improving your SEO performance. Now, this doesn’t mean anything goes. Your content must be relevant to your business.
TOP TIP: Think of a key phrase someone may search for to find your article or web page. This will act as the foundations of what you write.
Your key phrase is a chosen word or phrase that will be ranked against google quality score metrics to achieve organic ranking.
It’s important this key phrase is relevant to your content piece and considers client search intent. Whether that be informational (gathering info), or transactional (looking to acquire a service).
Each page or piece you write should have a unique key phrase, which is populated naturally throughout the piece (3 times minimum). But it is important not to just cram in your key phrase as much as possible. Remember, someone will read this!
Put your audience first
It’s easy and understandable for people to get caught up in doing everything “by the book”. Box ticking to achieve the best SEO results possible. However, it’s important to remember that a living, breathing human being will visit your website, and thus needs to have an easy experience reading your content and navigating your website.
Although others may say differently, we believe you must put your audience first. Your SEO may be spotless, but if someone visits your website and your piece isn’t resonating with your target audience, or their navigation experience is poor, they’ll click away and go elsewhere. Rendering all that SEO work an expensive waste of time.
TOP TIP: Strike a balance between good SEO and User Experience.
User experience (UX) is just as vital as SEO. In fact, a better user experience will often result in an improved SEO performance. It is common in the professional services sector that many web visits will come via recommendations and referrals. As such, it is vital the website provides the user with an easy to navigate experience. As well as being able to rank well for those who do come organically via a search engine.
Some of the key things to consider when improving UX are:
- Proper use of headings and subheadings
- Ensure content is easy to digest and is relevant to your product / service, and audience
- Make your content visually appealing by using imagery and graphics
- Make your site mobile friendly
- Reduce page loading speed
The technical side of SEO – The Good, the Bad and the Average
As a business owner or marketing professional, this section heading will have instilled either bliss or despair.
There are many components within SEO that are easy to understand. However, elements such as alt tags, backlinks and slugs can make you feel like you’ve been led up the garden path.
The good news is, there are many platforms out there which can help.
TOP TIP: Use a website tool or plugin to assist with SEO efforts.
SEO and readability specific plugins such as Yoast are a fantastic and accessible way to easily understand SEO. Outlining exactly what it is you must do to achieve best SEO practice.
Yoast uses a traffic light system to easily represent when your SEO score is good, average or needs improvement. It will then highlight the specific sentences in your piece which require a second look.
Learn to crawl before you walk
Before utilising a tool such as Yoast, there are a few things you should learn to include in your content as a matter of course. One of these being links.
Both internal and external links are vital for google quality SEO. Internal links, (links which point to pages on your own website), provide users with a key path to navigate through your website, reaching more relevant content. These links also improve Google’s ability to crawl your website, and therefore discover, and rank your content.
External links are links which take the user to a website which is not your own. These can be for the purpose of content validation or even collaborative working. The quality of the websites you link to can have a real impact on your SEO score. The better, more relevant the website, the better the score.
Likewise, if you collaborate with another organisation, make sure they link back to your website. This is called backlinking. Backlinks are important for SEO as Google views these links like recommendations. Putting it simply, the more backlinks a page has, the more trustworthy Google deems it to be.
There are many more aspects of SEO which need to be considered to achieve an improved website performance.
If you need help with your SEO, require optimised written content, or are looking to review the content on your website, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d be more than happy to help. Call: 01727 844 000 Email: hello@conical.co.uk