At the end of the day, when it comes to building a successful, blossoming business, you can tick every other marketing box, including professional, slick branding, in-depth research into both your audience and main competitors, on top of nailing a strong social media presence. However, if the traffic isn’t there, your website may never fully reach its potential and take off. That’s why you need to ensure one very key element is included across your marketing strategy – SEO.
An abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation, SEO strategy hones in on the content appearing on your site and puts into motion certain signals that alert search engines your website is one worth prioritising and ranking highly in search results. In turn, this makes your website easier to find when users input certain queries to their search bar and draws in the kind of audience you’re hoping to hook, line and sinker.
- Offer valuable, quality content
There are plenty of tricks in the SEO handbook surrounding content, from keyword ratios to outbound links, but in order to find any success with them they need to be executed well and with your potential users in mind. That’s where this idea of quality content comes into the mix. Whilst the use of particular keywords can help to see you sitting above the fold for certain search results, overuse can make copy read quite sloppily and really take away from that all-important user experience. You want your content to read well, show authority on the subject-matter and actually give something to users, whether that’s further knowledge or a service.
As well as piecing together well-informed and well-written copy, then, this also means bringing together a collection of trusted sources to back your ideas, with appropriate, quality outbound links to your sources, as well as offering further reading for your user. Much like an academic essay, these credentials give well-rounded information. What’s more, linking out is more likely to draw others to link to your content. Just ensure the links you choose are to quality websites and actually add value to what you’re saying.
Ultimately content on your website should read organically. The likes of Google will see through content that is created purely in the hope of ranking. Remember that you’re looking for a human being to visit your website and therefore it should showcase something you can be proud of.
- Pay attention to the small details
When it comes to producing a website of quality, you need to ensure you’re painting a full picture and offering a smooth pathway from beginning to end for all visitors on your website. This includes things like unique, snappy meta descriptions and titles that highlight why the page might be relevant to a user, as well as depicting you host the most up-to-date information. As the meta title and description are what is displayed in search results, for much of your traffic, this may be the first point in which a user interacts with your site, so it’s a good idea to paint a good first impression.
Whilst we’re taught we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it’s true that users may think about looking twice at a website that looks like it hasn’t been touched since the early noughties. Website design is important, appealing visually to your visitors with a website they’d be happy to scroll through. This goes for website loading speeds, too. In a time of short attention spans, nobody wants to be waiting more than a couple of seconds for a website to load. Check in on your loading speeds to guarantee a swift experience for all and avoid putting them off at the first hurdle when hopping onto your site.
- Utilise analytical tools
Whether you’re doing research into the best keywords to target or you want to keep a close eye on your website’s performance, it’s a good idea to have the right tools at your disposal from the offset. This allows you to track traffic and so on right from the word go and have a broad picture as time goes on, allowing you to spot patterns, drops and influxes, meaning you know exactly what you’re doing right and wrong in those instances.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console are fantastic for, with the former, tracking traffic and further insight of location, age range and so on, whilst the latter offers an abundance of tools including pushing Google to cache pages and looking up competitive keywords.
Of course, there are plenty of tools out there to utilise, so it’s worth doing your research, deciding what you want out of your tool, where your priorities lie and which tool can offer the most bang for buck.