If you’ve built a beautiful website it’s important to know that your customers can find it. Google Ads can put you in the right place but most businesses rely on SEO to get their websites found.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is setting up your website so that you get the best performance in organic searches. Getting the best performance comes from making sure that the search engines understand what information you have available for someone completing a search.
In today’s business world, getting your SEO right can mean the difference between a first page ranking and success, or never making a sale. If you need some expert help then give the team at caddie digital a call today. If you want to know more about what’s involved in improving your search performance, read on.
1. Who are your customers and what are they searching for?
Who do you want to bring to your website? As with all marketing, identifying your target audience is an important first step in optimising your search performance.
Once you’ve worked out who you want to target, you can work out what information they need. Search engines match both content and intent – the information that your audience is looking for and what they want to do with it. If your customers want to shop then you need to make your product available. If they want to research then the information you share will be key.
Once you know why your customers are searching, you can fill your website with content that provides the information they need. Good content is one of the most effective ways that you can improve your search engine performance.
2. Sort out your tag lines and meta descriptions.
The names and descriptions that you give to your pages are one of the easiest ways for a search engine to understand the content you have to share.
Your title should be less than 60 characters and both match your customer’s search intent and contain keywords. Your meta description is limited to 160 characters (you can include more but only the first 160 characters will be displayed). It should accurately describe the information available on the page, match your customer’s search intent, and encourage them to take action.
3. Optimise your images.
Your images make up part of the network of information that the search engine recognises on your website. Giving them the right name and format can not only help to speed up loading times and improve quality, it also helps to improve the search performance of your website.
4. Speed up your website loading times.
Speed is important to your customers and that means it’s also important to search engines. That means loading rate is a very important measure for both mobile and desktop searches.
If you want to avoid your loading rate moving you down the organic rankings, make speed a priority. Optimise your image sizes and formats, check your content structure, and if necessary recruit an expert to make sure you’re achieving quick page loading times.
5. Create a flow to your website content with internal links
Internal linking helps your customers to navigate the information you have to share. If you know that one piece of content may stimulate a purchase then add a link to make it easy to shop. If information on a product may create questions on how to use it, connect the relevant piece of content so it’s easy to access.
Linking between content on your website smooths your customer’s experience and makes it easier for them to interact with the information you’re sharing. It also makes it easier for search engines like Google to interpret the hierarchy of information on your website and promote your content through organic searches.
6. Improve the user experience on your website
As well as internal linking there are a raft of structural tricks that can make it easier for your customers to find what they need. Providing the right information clearly makes it increasingly likely that your customers will move to purchase your products or hire your services.
Pay close attention to tools like subheadings within pages and how you structure your content to make it easy for customers to jump to the information they need. Make sure your content is visually appealing with use of white space and images to break up text. Steer clear of intrusive pop ups and make sure it’s always easy for your customers to get to where they want to go.
7. Include keywords in your URLs
The Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of your website are basically the addresses that point to the information you share. Like any cataloguing function the more straightforward the language the easier it is to find what’s inside.
Using keywords in your URLs can help to improve your search performance because it reinforces what the content is within each page. That makes it easier for the search engine to match your website with the search terms your customers are using.
8. Increase your backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to content and pages on your website. They operate like a verification to a search engine that your website is authentic and really contains the information that you say it does.
The more reliable the website that links to yours, the better the impact of the backlinks on your search performance. Once you have relevant content on your website it’s worth approaching related businesses and encouraging them to share your website with their customers. The more websites you can get sharing your URLs, the better the impact on your search engine performance.
9. Submit your website to Google
If you’ve ever been formally introduced to someone you will know it’s a good way to meet and find out about a person. Your website can benefit from the same kind of introduction and we recommend submitting your details to Google.
Submitting your website to Google basically allows you to introduce your website, what it’s about and how it’s structured, and make sure that Google formally knows the information you’re ready to share. This formal introduction takes away a lot of the risk of Google not knowing what you’re communicating, and combined with a well optimised website can help to improve your organic ranking.
10. Complete a website audit
If you’re not sure if any of the issues highlighted in this blog apply to your website then a website audit can help. In one simple audit, we can identify the elements of your website that need to be fine tuned because they could be impacting your website’s search performance.
Your audit is comprehensive and easy to understand. You’ll receive a detailed report with easy to understand directions on how to improve your search engine performance. We can talk you through the results and – if you choose – put in place an action plan to get any issues resolved quickly. Call the team at caddie digital today to find out more.
