SEO is a major marketing factor that no online business can afford to ignore. Search engine optimisation isn’t something that you can do once and then forget about; it’s a long game with most companies waiting at least a few months to see the results of their strategies and all the hard work that they have put in. If you’re just starting out in business, this might be why you’ve been put off investing your effort, money or time into SEO for your website, but it’s definitely going to be worth it in the long run. Without SEO, it’s going to be harder for you to make sure that your business website is visible online and discoverable by your target audience. Thankfully, there are several handy tips that you can make use of to get an SEO boost for your brand.
Work with an Agency
The easiest option for business owners with limited knowledge of SEO is to call on the experts. Search engine optimisation can cost you a lot more than you need to spend, and it can waste a lot of your time in the long run if you are trying to do it yourself alongside everything else. This is especially true if you don’t know anything about SEO as you’re going to have to spend time learning about it and coming up with strategies that will work for your business. Working with an agency can be the best way to get your business ranking higher in Google faster and enjoy a quicker and bigger return on investment for your brand. For example, PWD is an agency offering SEO in Perth for businesses that want to grow online. They’ll work closely with you to better understand your business and put together a customised strategy for success. You can find more information here.
Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly
If you’re not ready to hire an agency just yet, there are a few simple things that you can do to ensure that your business is getting the best possible SEO results in the meantime. One of the first things to do is to check your website’s loading speed. Websites that take a while to load are not only frustrating to users, but they can also really impact your bounce rate as visitors give up waiting and go somewhere else instead. Not only does this send negative signals to Google, but you’ll also be losing business to your competitors.
Provide a Mobile-Friendly Experience
Mobile phones are no longer a luxury and more and more people are using them as their main computer. This means that whatever industry your business is in and whether you’re selling products or services to consumers or other businesses, you can be guaranteed that visitors are going to be accessing your website using a smartphone or another mobile device such as a tablet. This means that you need to have a website that is responsive. It should look and perform great on any device. Regardless of how much work you put into SEO strategies, a website that isn’t responsive will instantly cause you to drop down the rankings, so make sure that this is a priority.
Optimise Your Content
Ideally, every type of content on your business website should be optimized for SEO. This not only includes fitting relevant keywords into written content wherever it can be done so naturally, but also making sure that your images have relevant names, too. As you build your business website, you know that images add visual interest and help visitors understand more about what your brand does. However, Google also crawls through your images to look for any connections to relevant content when a search is made. To help your images appear further up in relevant search results, make sure that they are named rather than sticking with IMG12345.jpg. Taking a couple of seconds to come up with a descriptive name for your images can make a huge amount of difference.
Start a Business Blog
The more content your business website produces, the better – and one of the best ways to get more content out there from your brand, is by creating a business blog. You can fill your blog with information that visitors are going to find useful such as tips to help them get the most out of your products and services, the latest news from your business, and much more. However, when creating content for your blog, it’s important to keep your users at the forefront of your mind. While it’s a good idea to include relevant keywords in your content wherever possible, your main priority should be to write content that provides some value to the reader.
Use Social Media
While social media is not directly connected to your Google ranking, you can improve traffic to your website and in turn, boost SEO by sharing the content that you publish on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Set up social profiles on all relevant networks and ensure that you are using consistent branding across each one. Post regularly, whether you are sharing content that has been specifically created for social media or linking to your latest blog posts. Make an effort to use social media to build strong relationships with your followers and engage with them as much as possible, which will improve your chance of increasing website traffic and getting more shares.
Consider Using SEO Plugins
Finally, if your website is built with WordPress, there are various SEO plugins to consider. Yoast SEO is one of the best options to choose from as you can use it to automate a lot of time-consuming SEO tasks such as generating a sitemap to submit to Google and helping you ensure that your pages and blog posts are optimised for SEO.
SEO is a time-consuming job for small business owners who may have not known much about it when first starting out. While SEO is something that you need to do in the long-term to get the best results for your business, get off to the best start with these simple tips.
