7 Simple Ways To Optimise Your Website For SEO
As Christmas approaches, are you dreaming of a larger marketing budget to take you into the New Year? If so, you’re not alone. We work with lots of local companies and they tell us that there are always competing calls on their limited resources, and marketing all too often falls by the wayside.
Our solution is an invaluable marketing tool that can be initiated without spending any money whatsoever – Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO. It’s a series of steps you can take to improve your website’s online trust and authority, so that the major search engines promote it to a higher ranking position. The higher you rank, the more customers you have.
Here are 7 simple ways to optimise your website for SEO:
1.Get a Free SEO Audit
An SEO audit tells you how well your website is currently operating in terms of search engine ranking. But that’s just the headline. It also gives you a detailed analysis of where your site could be improved, and how you can go about improving it. The report shows you how you compare with your closest competitors, and even offers you a list of keywords you can start using immediately.
2. Decide on Your Keywords
There’s much talk of keywords but they come down to something quite simple. Your keywords are all the ways people might describe your product when entering it in a search query. Eg: bread, loaf, rolls, brown bread, seeded bread, fresh bread etc. It’s a painstaking job but it’s well worth it. Once you’ve identified your top 5 keywords, use them consistently on every page of your site.
3. Take a Look at Your Titles and Meta Descriptions
All your page titles are what appear in searches (Google displays them in blue). Make sure that every title uses a keyword, and clearly describes the content of the page. The meta description is the short paragraph that appears under the title in search engines, and can make the difference between some clicking through or not. Make them clear, interesting and informative.
4. Add a Blog Page to Your Website
The major search engines reward sites that update and refresh their content regularly. Blogging, or posting company news, is a great way to do this. To make an impact, blogs need to be posted regularly (at least once a week), they should offer information or ideas that are of value to your customers. They should be over 500 words, and they shouldn’t be copied from other articles online.
5. Resize Your Images and Describe Them
Google is currently penalising sites that load too slowly. Large images slow down your website dramatically, so reduce the size where you can. You are also able to create a descriptive filename for each individual image, and offer alt tags, or descriptions of what is in the image. This gives Google, for example, a way of knowing what the image is of, and this practice is rewarded.
6. Create a Google My Business Page
If you’re a local business this is a ‘must do’. It’s a simple process, that should be done carefully to ensure that your address, your company name etc. is copied across correctly onto the page template. Once you’ve populated your page, you can feature blogs, news or pages. Your geographic location is used by Google to promote you locally, and your customers can leave reviews that will boost your ranking.
7. Use Google Analytics
Anyone with a website can set up a Google Analytics account. It’s an invaluable source of data relating to the number of visitors to your site, the pages they visit, and the time the spend on each one. You can use it to find out which pages are working, and which invite a high bounce rate. You can also try experiments to find out what kind of features increase traffic to your site.
Imagefix Offers SEO Support to Businesses
SEO doesn’t happen overnight but it gives you steady, solid growth. With careful, and regular attention you will gradually build your online reputation and you’ll be rewarded with a high ranking position. There’s always more to do, and new ways to improve your site, but once the phone calls start coming in you’ll see how worthwhile your effort is.
Imagefix offer a range of services to optimise your website for SEO. We can manage the entire process for you, or offer discrete services such as professional blogging, site optimisation, local SEO, regional SEO or speed optimisation.
Imagefix’s 7 simple ways to optimise your website for SEO. Call today on 01525 715608 to talk to an expert.
