A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

If you’re thinking about launching a business with little risk, the internet is an excellent platform to launch a business and have instant access to thousands of potential customers. The only disadvantage – anyone can do it so your business can be easily lost in amongst your competitors. That’s where SEO comes in. It’s the means whereby you show Google that you’re an expert in your field so they can rank you high in search results.

With 93% of online experiences starting on a search engine, working on the SEO of your website is an effective way to get you in front of your customers. In effect – search engine optimization needs to be an essential part of your marketing campaign.

Follow these tips to improve your SEO, get online enquiries and watch your business grow.

For great SEO results, content is king

Gone are the days of keyword stuffed webpages, spammy link building and black-hat SEO practices. Google has improved its ranking factors to penalize bad practices in order to get the loyal experts to the top of the search results. And – Google does this by indexing exceptional, useful content.

Get blogging

By blogging regularly, you get your business visible on Google by targeting a large number of keywords and getting more webpages indexed in Google searches.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to get your target audience onto your website. In fact, 60% of consumers feel more positive about a purchase after reading content on a website; content is key. In effect – attracting customers on to your website via a blog post, is one of the best practices to get your target market to trust your brand and invest in you.

What’s more, HubSpot found posting 1-2 blog posts every month can generate 70% more online enquiries than businesses who don’t blog. If you are publishing relevant, useful blog posts 6-8 times per month, you can see an increase of 140% more enquiries.

Publish your content on other websites

In order for Google to place your website ahead of your competitors, you need to make Google value your website. Google calculates this by your domain authority. You can build your domain authority by getting your URL published on websites. So, the more Google sees you, the more Google values you.

Get your name out there by posting blog posts on high quality websites that are relevant to your brand. This will build links to your website and put you in front of an audience that are likely to click through to your website. For example, if you sell organic skincare products, get your content featured on health and beauty blogs and websites.

Fix these Common SEO Mistakes 

1. Not using Google Analytics

Monitoring your results on Google Analytics can help you see which keywords are converting and which  are not. You may find that you’re getting a lot of traffic from high-traffic keywords – but if they’re not converting into online enquiries, it’s worthless. By analysing results, you can tailor your content to include keywords to engage with the right audience.

2. Not optimizing for local searches

If you’re business serves a certain area, optimising your website for local searches helps potential customers in your region find you. Begin by including your area in page titles and meta descriptions.

3. Not optimizing the right keywords

When it comes to keywords, it’s best to be as specific as possible to get better search engine rankings and accurate traffic.

4. Not using unique page titles and meta descriptions for every page & blog post

Every page needs a unique title that includes a keyword and a descriptive meta description that will attract a potential customer to click through to your website.

5. Not using anchor text for internal links

When you’re linking to services or products in your web content and blog posts, make sure to use a keyword as the hyperlink. For example, instead of “click here” which holds no SEO value, use “social media management services”.

6. Not creating shareable, useful content

To improve your domain authority and direct quality traffic to your website, you need to create extremely useful content that people will link on their websites and social media platforms.

For example, as a social media marketing company we publish tips & guides to provide our readers with content that’ll be a great value to their blogs and businesses, such as:

Top Five Tips for Blogging Success
A Beginners Guide To Periscope
5 Tips of Boosting Your Fashion/Beauty Social Media Page

Use these SEO Tips & Tricks

1. Identify your keywords on Google AdWords

To find out your relevant keywords, sign up for a Google AdWords account and use the keyword planner tool to identify the most popular search terms for your industry.

2. Use keywords in your page titles

Your page title is the first line of content that shows up in search results for your website. Every page needs a unique page title that includes a keyword at a maximum of 70 characters.

3. Write engaging and optimised meta descriptions

Your meta description is the text underneath the page title in search results. Using 160 characters you need to attract potential customers to click onto your website. Include a unique selling point, what exactly you do and a keyword within the text.

4. Include meta tags/keywords on every page

Assign every page with keywords that are unique to the page. Use a maximum of five keywords. Not forgetting that your chosen keywords also need to be included in the content of the page.

5. Implement H1 tags in your page content

H1 tags is the largest HTML heading there is (they go up from H1 to H6). Using a H1 tag will help Google identify the keyword you’re optimising. In the HTML editor of your page or blog post, use H1 tags to lay emphasis on your primary keyword.

For example:

<h1>Social Media Management</h1>

6. Add your keywords to your alt text in every image you upload

Like the written content on your website, you need to optimise images with keywords. When you’re uploading images, optimize a keyword in the ‘Alt Text’ of your image. The ‘Alt Text’ shows up when an image cannot be displayed. This also tells Google what you’re optimizing so they can index your images for Google searches.

7. Title text

The title text describes the link’s content, to get the most SEO value, use keywords to describe the destination to tell Google to rank you for a particular keyword.

For example: when you’re hyperlinking a service, ‘Social Media Management’ will appear in place of hyperlinked text such as ‘find out more here’.

8. Have a XML sitemap for your site

This is a map of your website and it tells Google what pages to index in searches.

9. …as well as robots.txt

Robots.txt is a bit of code which helps search engines find your XML sitemap. In effect – this helps Google robots improve your rankings and help direct your target audience onto your website.

10. Check your site speed

Slow loading times can make a user close your website. As Google wants to rank useful websites high in searches, your website needs to be accessible and easy to navigate. Factors to a slow web speed could be large image files, lots of adverts, unnecessary redirects, a shared web hosting provider (if you’re website gets a lot of hits), excessive scripts, broken links, too many plugins installed and a web design with a large file size.

11. Optimise your website for mobile

In April 2015, Google rolled out an update that boosts the ranking of mobile-friendly websites in search results. So if you’re website isn’t optimised for mobiles and tablets, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic.

12. Redirect links that have been changed or broken

If you have changed the URLs of your webpages or have URLs that don’t work, then links should be directed to a live page or a 404 page.

Want to find out more about SEO? We would love to hear from you! Feel free to comment below, tweet us at @purelysocialtip or send us an email beseen@purelysocialmedia.com.