10 Tips to SEO Success
Today we’re covering one of my most favourite marketing strategies and that is SEO - Search Engine Optimisation.
I’ll share some secrets giving you 10 tips to SEO success for your business. These 10 tips will give you the focus and clarity on what to prioritise so you can see an increase in organic search engine results for your business. I mean who doesnt want more traffic to their website… and who doesnt want more FREE traffic to their website.
Let’s go…
Let’s start with defining SEO, what is this SEO that you hear so often and what does it mean for your business??
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation:
‘… is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”
Source: MOZ.com
An SEO Strategy is:
An SEO strategy is a plan to create, optimize, and promote content to improve its visibility in search engine results. To attract more organic traffic to a website.
As SEO is about improving your website’s search engine rankings. The first step is to understand your baseline: How visible is your website now?
The best way to do this is by creating a Google Search Console account if you dont already have one. This will give you an overview of your sites performance including how often people see your site, how many times they click through, and what keywords are driving traffic to your site already. The 3 key benchmarks to look at to establish your baseline are:
* Organic traffic - use Google Analytics to learn your organic traffic volume
* Keyword rankings - Keyword rankings are your website’s organic rankings in search results for particular keywords. In other words, it’s how high your pages show up on Google.Keyword rankings are important because higher-ranking pages tend to get more organic search traffic. Look for these four things:
* The keywords you rank for
* Your ranking position for those keywords
* The search volume for each of those keywords (how many times per month people search for them)
* How much traffic they bring in
Take note of the top five organic keywords
* Backlinks
Next, check how many websites have links pointing to your site.
Websites with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search rankings.
Backlinks are like votes of confidence. If many trusted and relevant sites link to yours, search engines can infer that yours is worth surfacing on search engine results pages (SERPs).
* Sign in to Google Search Console.
* Select your website (the target URL).
* On the left-hand side menu, click on 'Links'.
* Under 'External links', you'll see 'Top linking sites'. This will show you the domains linking back to your site.
Next, we want to look at Competitors: When we look at clients SEO we will also conduct a competitor analysis and you can do this using a tool like Semrush
identify valuable keywords your competitors currently rank for but you don’t.
Each of those keywords represents an opportunity for you to capture more traffic
You can also look to review your competitors websites using tools like SEMRUSH to help you to be able to compare your sites performance to that of your competitors
You want to identify valuable keywords
Keywords are words or phrases searchers plug into search engines, like Bing or Google, to find information or products.
Keywords are at the heart of a strong SEO campaign.
Which means identifying keywords that align with your content and match your target audience’s needs is critical.
Onceyou’ve completed your SEO Audit to determine your baseline, you are now armed with the information you need to be able to set your SEO Goals and KPIs.
Goals are the end outcome that you want to achieve.
KPIs are measurable values that help you track progress against your goals.
For example, you may be a hotel that is keen to drive more direct bookings so you have a marketing goal to increase your SEO traffic by X% however you can also put a revenue figure to that - for example, your SEO goal could be to increase organic revenue by $300,000 over the next 12 months.
And your KPIs for this goal could be organic impressions, organic traffic, and rankings.
The right KPIs to track depend entirely on your goals.
But here are five KPIs you should probably keep a close eye on:
1. Organic traffic
2. Keyword rankings
3. Backlinks
4. Average click-through rate (CTR)
5. Indexing issues
Ok, so we’ve covered the key elements that you need to cover to be able to determine where your website performance is right now that will enable you to determine what your focus should be on.
Before we get to the 10 tips for SEO success, I just want to cover off 2 main categories of SEO. The first one is called on-page SEO (aka on-site) and the second is off-page (aka off-site). On-site SEO encapsulates all the optimisation techniques that you can apply to your website ‘on-site’ whereas off-site SEO refers to the actions that you take to optimise your website ‘off-site’ in the world wide web, external to your website.
Ok, now that we have that covered lets dive into the 10 Tips for SEO Success that you can use to increase the visibility of your business in search engine results.
10 Tips to SEO Success for Small Business:
ON-SITE SEO TACTICS:
1. OPTIMISE INFORMATION ON YOUR WEBSITE
Sounds obvious, but let’s get specific. What you want to do here is ensure each page of your website has a title, URL and description that relate to the keywords of your business. You want to align these with the page content to ensure you are maximising optimisation. For example, your About page would include keywords for what your business offers, your location/market you serve and contact details (or link to contact page). Your Services page outlines each of your services, once again using keywords that align to your Title & description and so on.
Note- if you have a wordpress site, there is a great free plugin that will assist you with optimising each page of your website. It is called YOAST.
For local business it can be important to have your Name, Address and Phone number (NAP) is on each page of your website. You can do this by putting your phone number or email (whichever is your primary contact channel) in your header and place your address in your footer.
2. CREATE COMPELLING CONTENT
There’s more than one reason to justify creating compelling content for your site:
* if written well it will answer the searcher’s query
* it provides you with content to share on your social media channels that will drive traffic to your website
* you are regularly providing your website with fresh content which increases the opportunity for your content to show up in the Search Engine Results (SERP) - Google likes this (When your website regularly publishes fresh content, it indicates to search engines that your site is active and committed to providing valuable information to users)
* it helps position your business as the authority of what you’re selling
3. OPTIMISE YOUR SITE FOR MOBILE USE
Most businesses today are aware of the importance of having a mobile friendly website however just incase you haven’t already taken this step, you MUST do this. Google now penalises websites, by the way of not displaying your business in the search results, if your site is not mobile friendly and secondly, you want to provide your visitor with the optimal experience. If a user has to pinch and reduce their screen or zoom in to find what they’re looking for it is highly likely that they’ll ‘bounce’ off your site and go to the next search result. Side note, a high bounce rate is not great for your website and is considered by Google when serving up search results.
4. USER EXPERIENCE
You may have started to hear these words more frequently over the last few years as we see the digital sphere progress from just having a website to now more focused being placed on how to create optimal experiences for people online. When designing your website you need to consider what that experience is for your customer. What is the information that they are going to be seeking out and how does this influence your site navigation; are your contact details prominent, are you encouraging them to join your community by subscribing to your newsletter or following you on your socials. What is your colour scheme and font family like – are they easy on the eye, easy to digest and logical in their flow. Do your pages load quickly and are your images optimised. Is it 100% clear what you do and who you do it for and why you do it?
OFF-SITE SEO TACTICS
5. LINK STRATEGY
A link strategy is identifying what related websites would make sense for you to link to and have a link back to your website from. For example, if your business is in the wedding industry you could look to list on bridal directory sites. Some of these may be owned by a publication and there may be a listing fee however it’s worthwhile having a look. Another example is that you should consider your industry association website which will require you to become a member however it is also a great endorsement for your business to be on the peak industry body website.
You also want to ensure that when you’re posting on your social media channels that you link back to your website and if your content is shared on other sites, that there is a link back to your website.
6. Find (and Steal) Your Competitors’ Broken Backlinks
Broken link building refers to finding links that don’t work on other websites and recommending they link to you instead.
For this search engine optimisation technique, you want to find your competitor’s broken backlinks. And steal them. To do this efficiently, you’ll need access to a tool like SEMRUSH and then reach out to those sites.
7. CREATE A GOOGLE MY BUSINESS PAGE
Creating a Google My Business page is free and provides another opportunity for your business to be displayed in the search engine results. You can also share your content on this listing, add photos, write a description that helps communicate and sell your products/services AND you can set up and manage google reviews through here
It is another great opportunity to increase the digital footprint for your business.
8. ONLINE REVIEWS
As mentioned above, you can use Google reviews to drive visibility and credibility of your business. You can also choose to add a third party review tool such as Feefo or Facebook provides review functionality. You can look to encourage reviews to customers through the various customer touchpoints on the post-purchase path, and give your customers a choice of options as to where to review eg Facebook or Google. Remember, there’s no need to be afraid of reviews. If you are providing a great service/product the majority of the time then your reviews will reflect this. Should you receive a negative review, be sure to acknowledge, investigate and respond.
9. SOCIAL MEDIA
I highly recommend using one or two social media platforms to drive brand awareness, engagement and lead generation. The use of social media platform(s) will also aid your SEO efforts as their domain authority will always be better than yours (unless you’re a major global brand… and even then…) so you can leverage this. A great example is quite often if I am searching for a business or person, their Facebook or Linkedin profile will display higher in the search results than their own website so make sure you are on a social media channel and that your contact information is up to date (including trading hours if applicable), and share content regularly. Not only will it help keep you top of mind, it will continue to build you up as an expert in your field.
10. POWER OF LOCAL OR NICHE MEDIA
Identify which media outlets can assist your business and take the time to build relationships with them. Give them positive reasons to share information about your business services or products. Seek out and offer to be a contributor to a segment of their newspaper, magazine, blog, radio show or podcast. Share your product or services with them in the right context. Remember, content creators whether journalists or bloggers are on the hunt for news worthy content every minute of the day so if you can create an angle that is unique, it is very likely to pique their interest. Some pitch ideas include:
* you’re sponsoring a charity event
* you’ve won an award
* you have the exclusive distribution of a new product/service
* you’re the first business in your area to introduce product/service X
* a team member is doing X to raise money for charity Y
CONCLUSION
You are now armed with 10 Tips to SEO Success for your business. By reviewing and actioning each of these 10 tips you can be confident that you are going to have a positive impact of the search engine optimisation of our website.
