Getting your business in front of the right customers and clients is essential – fix your website’s SEO so you don’t need to pay an arm and a leg to get your business on page 1 on the popular search engine.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, involves making sure your website content, images, and speeds are optimised to a set of criteria specified by Google. The only issue is, Google will never tell you exactly what this involves, and they update it more regularly than you’d expect. the act of making sure your content and site work as well as possible within Google’s ever-changing guidelines and calculations.
As a business owner or stakeholder, making sure your business shows at the top of search pages is essential for business growth, recognition, and branding.
1. Optimise for mobile
With the growth of mobile use comes the importance of optimising websites to operate on both mobile and desktop. Mobile display also offers new opportunities and hurdles for businesses wanting to make the most of the shift to mobile interfaces.
Mobile has quite different capabilities to traditional desktop internet pages – images need to be significantly smaller, and content is interacted with differently.
You may need to resize images, A/B test buttons and UI, or work with different imagery and content for legibility. A poorly functioning website will definitely be punished by one of googles algorithms – so it’s essential to invest your time into creating the right site.
If you want to play around with how various responsive displays will look, try out Google’s mobile-friendly test tool.
2. Go easy on the keywords
Keywords are important, but we’ve come a long way since they were first introduced as a “cheat” to appear for hundreds of popular phrases and terms. In the past, many website creators did a sneaky tactic called ‘keyword stuffing’, which involved everything from writing your keywords in white text on a white background to have one page holding the keyword hundreds of times.
Google didn’t take long to wise up – it uses ‘crawlers’ to figure out if the page being delivered is actually helping solve user intent, and punishing those who use underhand tactics to try and gain an unfair advantage.
This means the days of throwing keywords around are over. Repetitive, inane content is a big no-no. Instead, when planning content, research keyword popularity and relevance, and choose to focus on a handful of keywords and weave them in organically.
Read more: 5 Copywriting Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Business
3. Differentiate your products
The words you use to describe your products and business are the key to showcasing your brand and differentiators.
Put research into new trends and emerging key features people are likely to be searching for and make sure your descriptions mention how your product incorporates it.
Fix your SEO by writing engaging and accurate descriptions to help visitors in their purchasing decisions, and convey all the benefits available.
4. Write alt tags and meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are used by Google to gauge what your particular page is about. Google has been doing regular updates to the length it requires, but getting the gist of each page down to a concise description.
Meta descriptions are embedded into the website HTML code, but can also be the difference between Google providing one with a better SEO ranking.
If you’re running your site through WordPress, each page will have a section to type your meta description ‒ it will even let you know when the length is too long!
Alt tags are image-based, and let users (and Google) know what the subject and purpose of an image are. It’s a simple thing that is often overlooked when people create a website, and is an easy way to fix your SEO and earn bonus points with the Google overlords.
