SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of designing a webpage so that it appears high up on Google searches for target keywords. That makes it especially useful for businesses, because ranking higher means they will get more traffic. SEO is an ever-changing field because Google constantly tweaks the algorithm that controls where sites fall on its results pages. For example, earlier this year it made a big change that boosts pages that are friendly to mobile users and drops pages that aren't. There's a few different ways to kick off an SEO campaign depending on your needs, but they are highly useful ways to start attracting more interested viewers to your website. In this article, we'll tell you our five favourite tips to make your SEO a success and propel your business to new heights. Should you want to speak to a Sydney SEO Specialist, contact Quantum today for a free consultation.
1. Focus On Your Demographic
Every business has a target demographic that would be most interested in its product, service, or brand. One of the keys to SEO is to ensure that you always keep in mind how the content you put on your site will benefit the target audience. Think about it in terms of added value. For example, this mailing is adding value to you by educating you about SEO. Does the content on your site educate viewers about something they didn't know about? Are you helping them make an informed decision about your product? You need to keep content fresh, relevant, and valuable, and the best way to do that is to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. Think about what you would want to know if you wanted to buy a product like yours. By adding fresh, valuable content to your website at frequent intervals, you will rank higher on keywords related to your content. Google tries to reward high-quality content that gets lots of views with a better ranking. This is why so many business websites have blogs nowadays- they are great ways to continually create content for users. Blogs are also a great way to attract links.
2. Manage Your Backlinks
One of the biggest ways that Google evaluates the quality of content, such as the content in your company blog, is by seeing how many other reputable and valuable pages link back to it. The algorithm decides that if it sees a lot of people linking to a post on your blog, it must be a good blog. On the other hand, if you don't get many links your blog posts aren't very valuable to other people, because nobody is talking about them and linking to them. That will hurt your ranking. Worst of all is poor-quality backlinks. If you have sketchy sites linking to your posts, Google will believe that you are trying to game the system by paying for backlinks. You need to ensure that all backlinks arise from organic, natural discussion of your content. Anything else will penalise you. Google will tank your site's ranking if you get too many bad links. That's why it's critical to periodically investigate your backlinks and prune out any that come from disreputable sites or don't have a good discussion around them. This will also let you remove any links that have become disfavoured by Google as a result of algorithm changes since your last sweep- Google is continuously changing how it views links and backlinks, so you need to keep up.
3. Keep Up With Technical Issues
There's a lot of little things that go into making a website work, and you need to ensure that all of them are functional. Make sure the design is clean and uncluttered. If your site has dead links, missing pages or content, broken images, coding errors, and similar problems, then you need to correct them right away. They can frustrate readers. Your site also needs to load quickly and easily on many different platforms and browsers. Google maintains technical standards and guidelines. If your site fails to live up them, then you will suffer lower rankings. Fortunately, Google also provides technical advice on how to meet their guidelines, so be sure to read up and check every part of your site. If your company is meeting all the standards, then not only will you provide a better user experience, you will also rank higher on searches for your keywords. It's a win-win for you. One of the most important standards is the mobile-responsiveness requirement.
4. Always Remember Mobile Users
Mobile responsiveness is a term Google uses to describe a small group of features that make a website easy for people on mobile devices to browse. Most notably, they include making sure links are spaced far apart so they are easy to tap, making sure the font doesn't get distorted on a small screen, and having images and other content resize itself to be appropriate for any screen size. Mobile users are rapidly becoming the largest group of Internet users, so it is absolutely critical that you make your site easy for them to use. If that wasn't enough motivation, Google will catapult your site to the top (ahead of competitors who are non-mobile friendly) if it meets their mobile-responsiveness standard. You can check your site using Google's tools to see if it meets their standard. You should also check your internal performance metrics for mobile users to make sure that you are reaching them and they are staying on the site to consume content and make purchases. If you are not attracting many mobile users or they leave the site quickly, then something is wrong and you need to make your design more mobile-friendly.
5. Go Local With SEO
SEO isn't just about global searches. The most likely people to be your customers are the ones who live closest to your business. That means you need to target them with local SEO. This is a huge booster for your search engine results ranking as well as a new way to connect with interested customers. Local SEO is a new part of SEO. It's based around Google reviews, Yelp pages, and similar directories where local businesses maintain pages and users leave reviews. Google reviews are the most beneficial for your rankings, but Yelp can be nearly as good and even more informative for users. People looking for a business near them will see your site and its reviews and contact info pop up right away. This is especially useful if you have multiple branches and you want each one to rank well for searches in their local area. Set up a Google My Business account and a landing page for every branch or location, and make them detailed and organised. It should be immediately clear what you are, where you are, how to find you, and how to talk to you. This is also a good target page for backlinks!
These tips should get you started on your own SEO campaign and help you outrank your competition. If you need any help with SEO, please get in touch with Quantum. We are experienced with all kinds of SEO work and we can help you boost your traffic with our expertise.
