In this digital age, it is crucial for businesses to have a website in order to compete with competitors and move with the times – no matter how small or large these businesses may be. A well-built and optimised website is the perfect advertising platform to engage new customers and achieve more sales.
The internet has changed radically since it began and none more so than over recent years. Today having a website is not in itself enough and ranking highly to increase online presence is just as important as having the website in the first place. After all, if users aren’t finding your website then it’s about as effective as not having a website at all!
In this article we will look at five SEO techniques you can implement on your website to improve your rankings and ultimately get onto page one of the search results.
Create good quality content
Your website could have hundreds of pages of content, but if the content is poor quality then it will more likely be doing more harm than good. Just as having a website alone is not enough to rank, writing any old thing to fill up a page won’t either. Google wants to see informative, accurate and well written pieces of information that they can display to their users as a trusted resource. The best way to ensure your site has quality content is to make sure your website has a blog and you post topics on it frequently to engage with your audience. Search engines like fresh quality content!
Identify your keywords
Keyword research can be a tiring practice but it is essential for any SEO campaign to truly work. Think about your business. If you were a customer searching for businesses like yours, what would you search for? When undertaking keyword research, you need to find terms or phrases which produce a high monthly search amount but with low competition. As a small business, it does not make sense to select highly competitive terms where you will be up against internet giants such as Amazon and Ebay.
Build up a sound backlink profile
Building a quality backlink profile by engaging with relevant authoritative sites remains to be a good way of increasing your rankings; as your backlink profile improves watch your ‘trust flow’ rise!
Link building is often frowned upon because in the early days of SEO webmasters would use black hat techniques such as submitting to thousands of directories to gain links. Black hat practices are to be avoided at all costs as it can result in your website being slapped with a Google penalty, which can remove you from the search results altogether. There are hundreds of automated tools out there and people promising to get you 500 backlinks for £50 but the truth it, link building is a manual process of identifying high quality sites and gaining links using white hat techniques instead.
Organise and optimise your website
Whilst search engine optimisation is the process of optimising your website for search engines, the one important thing to remember about any website is it needs to be user friendly! Your site may rank well in Google but if users click on your website and it delivers a poor user experience, you are losing business and wasting traffic. Not only should you want the user experience to be good for your users, but it also happens to be a ranking factor. There are a multitude of changes you can make to your website to improve user experience and in turn improve your rankings, including:
Site speed – check your website load time and remember that slow websites turn people away
Title & Meta descriptions – ensure these are of correct length, relevant and include keywords to entice users to click
Mobile friendly – there has been an increasing drive over the last few years to ensure websites respond on mobile / tablet devices and are fully operational. Ensure your website does the same.
SEO isn’t a quick fix
If you’re looking for a quick fix, then SEO isn’t for you. SEO is an on-going process and results do not happen overnight. Google doesn’t crawl your webpages everyday so it mays take weeks for Google to crawl that page and identify the changes you have made. SEO is like most things in life, if you want the benefits from it you need to put in the hard work.
Think about if you stopped going to the gym after you reached your goal. You would soon start to slip back and fall out of shape. SEO is no different. Once your website has reached the stars, maintenance and regular tweaking is needed to ensure it stays there or you could find yourself going backwards and falling behind competitors.
Further reading on SEO techniques
