Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. In all honesty, if you don’t consider SEO when building and maintaining your website, it’s almost pointless having one!
According to Safari Digital, approximately 61% of marketers believe that SEO is the key to online success, which is why modern businesses allocate an average of 41% of their marketing budget to it. Taking the time to outline a proper SEO strategy can revolutionise not just your online traffic, but your business as a whole.
19. When building your website, it’s essential to keep SEO best practices in mind. A great place to start is Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which outline recommendations such as:
- How to help Google find your pages g. providing a sitemap file, ensuring all pages on your site can be reached by a link from another findable page, using the robots.txt file, etc.
- How to ensure Google understands your pagesg. creating a useful, information-rich site, thinking about the keywords users would type to find your pages and making sure that your site includes those words within it, ensuring that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive, designing your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy, etc.
- How to help visitors use your pages g. using text instead of images to display important names, content, or links, ensuring all links go to live web pages, optimising your page loading times, designing your site for all device types and sizes, etc.
20. Keep up-to-speed with Google’s quality guidelines. Here are the basic principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
- Don’t deceive your users
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.
21. Positive SEO is also about avoiding negative SEO! Avoid:
22. Spend time on your SEO landing pages. A landing page focuses on targeted keywords you hope to rank for and always includes a call to action. It is typically part of a larger inbound marketing campaign, where the goal is to increase your share of total search traffic within your industry. Effective landing pages funnel the user in a streamlined fashion towards a conversion event.
23. Let your keyword strategy guide your content. A solid keyword strategy forms the basis of a successful landing page. Select long-tail keywords strategically, focusing on search intent. Use keywords in the content naturally and logically, and remember to write for human readers, not bots. Search engine algorithms recognise and penalise keyword stuffing, so avoid this at all costs.
24. Use secondary and semantic keywords to add further context. Help Google understand what your landing page is about. Semantic keywords are phrases you don’t want to specifically rank, but that will support your primary keyword/s, helping to clarify the search intent you’re targeting.
25. Structure your landing pages to help search engine bots read, analyse and rank your content correctly. This includes optimised title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions, headings, internal links as well as images and videos. SEMrush goes into more detail here.
26. Build quality backlinks. These are links from other platforms to your website. The better quality these links are e.g. from respected, authoritative sources, the bigger the boost your landing page will receive in search. A popular technique to encourage backlinks is to create quality, shareable content﹣from engaging videos to infographics, survey statistics to whitepapers. You can also generate organic backlinks by publishing content on social media or content sharing platforms. Ensure your activity abides by Google best practice.
27. Select a content management system (CMS) that is SEO-friendly. A HTML5 or WordPress site gives you more control over factors critical to SEO and offers plugins to make your SEO efforts more effective. While automatic website builders are easier to use, they don’t give you 100% access to your website’s backend, which can limit your SEO activity. Make sure to do your research in this area before picking a platform.
For more information on SEO and also PPC, read our guide: search engine marketing for small businesses.