What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving and optimising your website to increase its visibility in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo when people search for terms related to your product or service. The higher your website ranks for relevant terms, the more likely you are to drive organic traffic to your website and convert them. 

Top tips for improving your rankings 

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, there are steps you can take to improve your rankings in the organic search results. Ideally, you need to ensure that your website ranks on the first page of Google for relevant keywords, and there are a few steps you can take to help ensure you get there. 

Improve website speed 

The speed of your website can directly impact your Google rankings. Google wants to provide its users with answers to their questions as quickly as possible. If a web page is too slow to load, users are likely to leave, resulting in high bounce rates, which can also have an impact on your rankings. Ensuring your site loads quickly will help improve your Google rankings and ensure your website performs better. 

Research shows that 40% of visitors will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Losing these visitors means you’re missing out on sales and you could be losing these customers to your competitors. And, if Google can see that people are leaving your site without interacting, it’s a signal that it’s not providing them with what they need and your rankings are likely to suffer. 

If your website loads quickly and offers customers a solution or an answer to their question, Google will recognise that your site is relevant and useful so will boost your rankings accordingly. 

Google’s Page Speed Insights tool can provide you with more information about the speed of your website and the issues that you can fix to improve the speed of your website. Factors such as your web hosting, image sizes and formats, plugins and the volume of traffic to your site can have an impact on its speed, so these are all factors to consider when trying to improve the speed of your site. 

Keyword targeting 

A keyword strategy will help you ensure that your website appears when people search for relevant keywords and phrases. 

We recommend that you find and target specific keyword phrases for each page on your website, such as your product or category pages. Use tools such as SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool to find out more about what your potential customers are searching for and how often they’re searching for it.  

Once you know which keywords you want to target, you will need to optimise or create corresponding pages on your website and make sure you use the keyword in the URL, title tag, meta description, header tags and subheadings on the page. 

💡 If you want to know more about conducting keyword research for SEO, take a look at our blog: How to do keyword research for SEO. 

Create high-quality content 

Creating relevant, authoritative content for your website is key to being able to rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is the main factor in how highly your website ranks or whether it ranks at all. 

High-quality content will help to drive traffic to your website and improve your site’s relevance and authority. Over time, you will become known as a hub for information by your prospective and existing customers which will give them a reason to keep coming back. The amount of time visitors spend on your site (dwell time), can also impact your rankings so creating content that’s interesting to your target audience will signal to search engines that your site is authoritative.

You should create pieces of content for your product or services pages but a blog can help you to rank for long-tail keywords which are the keywords searchers use when they’re looking for information or are further down the funnel. When writing a blog post, focus on the questions or problems your potential customers have and create content that can solve them and help them in their decision making process. Great content can have a huge impact on your rankings so having a content marketing strategy should be an important part of your SEO strategy.

Refresh old content 

Regularly updated content is an indicator of your website’s relevancy so, as well as constantly creating new content, have a look at older pieces that perform well and update them with new links or statistics to keep them up to date and relevant. 

Encourage social sharing 

Having your content shared on social media by your followers and customers helps to drive additional traffic to your website. Social signals tell Google that people find your content interesting and relevant so this, and the increase in traffic will help to boost your rankings. 

Optimise for mobile devices

Mobile now accounts for over half of all global website traffic. It has become more important than ever to optimise your website so that visitors can easily browse, read your content and buy online. Offering a good user experience for any device will increase the chances of visitors converting, no matter which device they use to visit your website. 

Optimise images 

Making sure your images are optimised properly will help with your SEO strategy. Images that are too large or the wrong format can slow down the loading time of your website which can have an impact on your rankings. 

Alt tags allow you to add relevant keywords to your images which can help to boost relevancy in the search results, as well as appear in Google Images for relevant terms. 

Build links 

Outbound and inbound links can increase the credibility of your website and shows search engines that other, authoritative websites find your content interesting and relevant. 

Linking out to other websites within your own content helps to increase credibility and shows that you have researched and are an expert in your industry. 

In addition, when other websites link to your website or content, it counts as a popularity vote for your website and, the more links (or votes) you have, the more popular you are with Google. 

💡 Learn more about link building for SEO in our blog: External vs internal linking for SEO: which is more effective? 

Track results 

Tools such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics will show you how your website is performing in the organic search results. Knowing how particular pages are performing, which pages are most popular will help you to keep making improvements and tweaking and improving your website to help it to rank higher. 

Having a look at the amount of search traffic you’re receiving, where your website ranks for particular keywords, bounce rates and how long people are spending on your website are all indicators of how successful your SEO efforts are and where you might need to focus for improvements. 

If you’d like to know more about improving your SEO rankings, why not request a free digital marketing audit our team will be able to provide you with advice and guidance on how to drive results through your SEO strategy. 

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