Search engine optimisation is among the most effective ways to position your small business for the future. Google processes 100 billion searches each month, and 75% of search users today never scroll past the first page of search results. If your site isn’t at the top of the first page results, your business will struggle to capture the attention of prospects.
On-site SEO optimisation is among the most effective ways to revolutionise your brand’s bottom line by capturing more organic traffic and leads from important search terms in your industry.
The following basic principles of modern search optimisation can allow businesses of any size to quickly improve their web presence:
How To Optimise Your Website For SEO
1. Improve Your Site Speed
How quickly does your site load? If it takes longer than 4 seconds, 25% of your visitors won’t stick around to wait. Nearly half of consumers today expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and slow websites can suffer from poor rankings and high bounce rates. Site speed is one of more than 200 factors which Google considers when ranking content, and it’s only becoming more important as consumers increasingly use mobile devices to conduct searches.
If you haven’t optimised or measured your load time, all of your other efforts to optimise your site’s content may not even matter.
2. A Logical User Experience
As search engines become increasingly human-like in their ability to rate and rank websites, user experience is becoming a more and more important part of on-site SEO optimisation. A well-designed, organised website that includes the following factors is key:
● Logical navigation and easily-accessible pages.
● Well-labeled site pages with high-value information
● Professional web design that loads well on both mobile devices and modern browsers
Poor page titles, confusing site navigation, and low-quality content aren’t just negative for your SEO, they can frustrate your prospects and customers, too!
3. Fresh Content
For years, Google has rewarded sites that regularly publish high-quality content. However, it appears this bias increased even more in the recent past. According to SEO expert Rand Fishkin, over the last year Google is “trying to show more and more fresh results” for search terms.
Creating more site pages, including landing pages and blogs, is a critical way to increase your chances of ranking for important search terms in your industry. If you haven’t set up a blog, this is among the most effective ways to capitalise on the fresh content bias.
Not only will it improve your authority in the eyes of major search engines, it’s an important way to build off-page SEO. HubSpot research has found that companies that blog acquire 97% more inbound links, and writing content that’s shared across social networks will build your site’s authority.
4. Keyword Targeting
Your ability to create high-value content around the right keywords and phrases affects around 15% of your site’s ranking, according to Moz’s research. This doesn’t mean you should stuff in keywords, or publish thin content just to have a page that fits a certain term. Discover the terms that are driving search in your industry, and create content on the topic that provides more value than anything your competitors have published to date.
When keyword targeting, it’s critical to consider how effectively you’ve used the word or phrase in your page headings and sub headings. Google, Bing, and Yahoo place more weight on headers and sub headers than the body content of your text.
Unfortunately, vague and non-descriptive page titles are among the most common small business SEO mistakes, and won’t help your on-page SEO optimisation efforts.
5. Unique Value
What makes your brand better than your competitors? If your site doesn’t clearly explain these differentiating factors, search engines will have a tough time telling the difference too.
Google’s own quality guidelines recommend that you “make your website stand out from others in your field.” Defining and creating content around your brand’s unique values, product differentiators, or how you fit into your industry is an important form of on-page SEO optimisation. Providing clear, unique value that your prospects can’t find on your competitions’ web pages can cause your rankings to soar.
HEY!
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Neil