5 Ways To Boost Your Search Engine Rankings
Search engine optimisation is a powerful marketing tool. Here’s how you can use it to your benefit.
Search engine is a powerful marketing tool, enabling you to boost your visibility and get the edge over your competitors, without blowing your budget. Here’s how you can make SEO work for your business.
Find The Right Keywords
Keywords are the cornerstone of SEO, so it’s important to spend time and effort getting this element right. Simply speaking, keywords are those words and phrases that customers use to search for your products and services, and carrying out research on your industry, competitors and customer behaviour can help you to identify the most relevant keywords for your business. This can be a lot of work but it’s definitely worth the effort, and there are some great keyword tools out there that can help with the process.
Once you have your keywords, avoid the temptation to pepper them indiscriminately throughout your site, as this is frowned upon by the search engine bots. Instead, try to use them organically in relevant content – more on this later.
Get Optimising
With your keywords lined up, it’s time to get optimising. Start by completing your pages’ meta-titles and meta-descriptions with relevant keywords, and creating keyword-rich unique titles for each of your pages. As well as making it easier for search engines to rank your pages, it also enables potential customers to see what a page is about, helping to improve the user experience.
And, while you’re optimising, don’t forget about your images. Populating the alt-text field with a relevant description that includes your keywords will help boost your performance in the search engine rankings.
Optimising your website can seem like a daunting task – especially if you have a large website – so break it down into smaller chunks, starting with those pages which are most important to your business.
Create Great Content
When it comes to SEO, content really is king. Search engines love content, and the volume and quality of content on your site will have a big impact on where you appear in the search engine rankings. For best results, you need to produce a regular stream of unique, good quality content that is relevant both to your business and to your customers. Good content can come in all different shapes and sizes – from news stories and blogs to product descriptions and how-to guides – so get creative and think about what your customers would like to see or read. Rich content, in particular, is popular with search engines and customers alike, and a good piece of audio or video can make all the difference to both the user experience and your SEO performance
Link Internally
One relatively simple way to boost your SEO is to include internal links in your content that direct visitors to other areas of your website. As well as providing a more seamless experience for your customers, strong internal linking also helps search bots to easily jump between pages, giving them a greater understanding of your website and of which sections are relevant to each other. For best results, make sure the links are not disruptive to the reader and instead are included naturally within the text.
Monitor, Measure And Evaluate
As with any marketing activity, measurement and evaluation are essential parts of successful SEO; how else can you find out if what you are doing is having an impact? Happily, the immediate nature of the digital world makes it pretty easy to monitor your SEO performance in real time. Website analytics and, of course, your position in the search engine results, will give you an insight into what is and isn’t working, giving you the opportunity to adjust your strategy as you go along.
Search Engine Optimisation is a great business marketing tool, but it can seem like a daunting task, especially if you lack experience or expertise in this area. If you’re feeling overwhelmed you might want to consider working with a search engine optimisation agency who can give you the advice and support you need to help your business rise through the search engine rankings.
