Have you just launched your first website? Or trying to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Well, in that case, this guide will help you to understand our top 10 SEO secrets to boost the performance of your site.
There is no point in devoting significant amounts of time and breaking the budget to build the perfect website if no one can find it! This blog will provide you with a range of basics you need to have in place to help you stand out in the ocean of online content. The harsh reality is, if you’re not ranking in Google’s top 10 results for your keywords, your website may as well be invisible on Google. According to HubSpot, 75% of online searchers never go past the first page of search results!
By understanding the basics of SEO right from the get-go and optimizing your site with keywords, content, and tags in mind, you’ll generate more online viewers leading to greater sales. The 10 organic tips we’ll be looking at specifically include;
- Test Your Websites Performance
- Finding the right keywords
- Focus on your unique offerings
- Build links to your site
- Publish high-quality content
- Get Social
- Ensure your website is user-friendly
- Increase Website Speed
- Optimise for Voice Search
- Measure SEO Results
Below are our top 10 SEO tips in more depth. We encourage you to use and apply these techniques to increase your website’s organic traffic and searchability. These SEO techniques should form a core part of your business strategy and will aid in increasing the traffic and visibility of your site.
Test Your Websites Performance
Before you dive into the details of improving the performance of your website, take some quality time to review and test your current site’s ranking in the search results and see where you can improve. Your main goal should be to get your website to the top of the search list. You check this using a beneficial tool such as Keyword Rank Checker, which will determine your current page ranking based on keyword searches. Moreover, if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the keyword ranking check, don’t panic, the following tips are going to tell you how to boost your sites overall SEO!
Finding The Right Keywords
Keywords define what your content is about, think about what words your sites viewers are likely to use when looking for your products or services on the internet. You want the keywords on your page to be relevant to what people are searching for, so they have a better chance at finding your content amongst the endless results.
Keywords are as much about your audience as they are about the content, you need to understand the needs of those visiting your site, ensuring you use the intended language and the type of content your customers are looking for. This can be done by talking to your customers and doing your keyword research with other online generators.
Focus on Your Unique Offerings
The market is a big game of buy and sell, so remember that your company is competing against other companies for the same online attention from potential consumers. To rise above most other websites and web searches for your industry, it helps to implement keywords that correspond to your market differentiators such as your geographic location or unique offerings.
Build Links to Your Site
The more sites that carry links to your website, the higher you will rank on searches. An easy way to implement links is to ask owners of related sites to carry a link to your site on theirs, in exchange for a link to their site on yours. In saying this, consider the quality of the links, one link directing to your website from a well-known reliable site will help you more than a dozen links from obscure blogs. What about the citations that Nick does?
Publish High-Quality Content
The best strategy to gain lots of organic traffic to your site is to create compelling content such as articles (like this one), videos and photos that provide quality relevant information to your viewers. Keep in mind, the main reason for search engines is to help people find the answers to their questions.
Implementing a good content strategy will also position you as a thought leader in your industry.
Get Social
Now more than ever, social media is so important for your business, especially to support your SEO strategy. Social media upholds a range of different functions and purposes, people today often search for companies and products using social media search functions (Facebook and Instagram etc). Your company’s social media profile will also rank in the search results when people search for your company or related terms. And get this, you can link your social pages directly to your website for even more traffic and links across platforms.
Ensure Your Website is Extra User-Friendly
Making sure you have a clean and easy to navigate website will ensure you rank higher than those that look untrustworthy, outdated, or are slow to load. Poor-quality sites are less likely to rank high and chances are your viewers return, resulting in a potential loss in sales. There are many ways in which you can make your website more user-friendly, here are some of the big ones to note:
- Make your posts easy to read: Write shorter paragraphs with mixed sentence lengths and better-quality content without punctuation errors or bad formatting. Sub-headings and bullet points are a great way to break up the text.
- Improve the user experience on web pages: High bounce rates often generally come from poor usability and an awkward user experience. User experience problems are challenging to pinpoint as they can vary dramatically across websites. There are a few user-testing tools available for analysing how people are interacting with your website, including Crazy Egg.
Increase Website Speed
Performance elements such as site speed are very important to users, hence its ranking factor. A sites speed can now make or break your site’s performance in Google’s search results. Google certainly wants your website to load and respond faster, but how fast exactly? Generally, three seconds is the sweet spot, however the faster the better.
If your site takes more than three seconds to load, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. Boosting page speed can do more than improve organic performance, it can also increase conversions, shopper experience, revenue and customer retention.
Optimise for Voice Search
With the exponential growth of user interface software, voice search is certainly something that you should be factored into your SEO strategy. Statistics show that 25% of adults in the U.S. now own a smart speaker, with that figure predicted to hit 55% by 2022.
Voice search and text search are very different, however, you should be optimising for voice search as technology advances. For example, a text searcher might type “parrot diet”, although a voice-based search tends to be longer and sounds something like “what do parrots eat?”
Measure SEO Results
While implementing SEO techniques to boost your website’s organic traffic and get your ranking higher amongst the endless searches, it is important to measure your results to identify what’s working and what’s not. Tools such as Moz, SpyFu.com, SEMRush.com and Google Analytics are there to provide you with additional information about the performance of the SEO of your site and the type of visitor you’re gaining. Information such as how people found your site, geographical location and how long they visited each page for all can be found using these online tools.
The harsh reality is, most users won’t make it past the second page of search results, meaning appearing on the first page is vital for your sites search ranking. Like all things, SEO is rapidly evolving and changing with society. As business owners and marketers, you need to act fast and stay on top of technology trends to give your website the edge over your competition. If you want to continue to see your website’s organic traffic increase, you need to implement these key SEO methods moving forward in the online world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Brockbank, J., 2020. 12 SEO Techniques to Increase Organic Traffic. [Blog] Semrush, Available at: <https://www.semrush.com/blog/seo-techniques/?kw=&cmp=AU_SRCH_DSA_Blog_Core_BU_EN&label=dsa_pagefeed&Network=g&Device=c&utm_content=484279366751&kwid=dsa-1053501809747&cmpid=11771895288&agpid=114769155576&BU=Core&extid=167363501002&adpos=&gclid=CjwKCAjw9uKIBhA8EiwAYPUS3Dud8n4-fBxu943xsqqLiXbW96iqMpICXaaSxCje1ELcDtHdMq3DGhoCm4UQAvD_BwE> [Accessed 16 August 2021].
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