SEO
One of the best ways to reach new customers is to make sure your site’s appearing when your customers are searching for answers to their problems or questions You do this through search engine optimisation (SEO)— optimising your site in the right way to improve the rank of your results when people search for terms related to your market.
Google accounts for nearly 90% of the searches on desktop, so if you want to go direct to the source, read their SEO guide to help the indexing of your site. This will happen automatically — Google’s ‘spiders’ continuously crawl, categorise, and rank all web content against a huge number of measurements.
Then, to deliver the right information to users, search engines analyse two factors:
Relevancy
Relevancy between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines assess it by various factors like topic or keywords. Work to improve relevancy is called on page SEO.
Authority
Authority is measured by a website’s popularity on the Internet. Google assumes that the more popular a page or resource is, the more valuable it is to readers. How does a website become more popular? You can tell if a website is popular if other websites link to it. For example, if you have 10 websites that link to your website, your website will be more popular than a website that has 5 websites linking to it. Work to improve authority is called off-page SEO.
An example of off-page SEO is building backlinks from other pages to your page.
When you’re looking at your site’s content, make sure it’s:
- Relevant — update it regularly, and use the same words people are searching to find your product or service.
- Easy to read — don’t use images as headlines, and make sure description tags for pictures or videos are accurate.
- Credible — if another site links to yours, that’s a vote in your site’s favor. So if other people have recognised this expertise by linking back, that will help.
- Honest — similarly, if you try to load up your site with keywords or links on hidden pages that are intended to be seen by crawlers but not customers, that counts as deception and can incur a ranking penalty.
- Well-built — if it’s easy for people to navigate, Google will probably like it. Make sure the links to your sub-pages are logically named, and minimise add-ons like auto-playing videos or pop-ups asking for email addresses. You’ll also want to make sure that your site loads quickly.
- Accurate — like most people, Google doesn’t like spelling mistakes or broken links. They can count more than you might expect.
- Optimised for mobile — more people now search on mobile over desktop, so sites which are more mobile-friendly are rewarded over those which are not.
How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy
- Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.
- Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.
- Understand how intent affects keyword research and analyse accordingly.
- Research related search terms.
- Use keyword research tools to your advantage.
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