I am sure you are all aware of the potential benefits of a top listing in Google, Yahoo or Bing. What do I mean by a top listing? Let me put it like this. If your website is not featuring on the first page of major search engines you can pretty much kiss goodbye to a steady stream of organic (free) traffic to your website or blog. When was the last time you went to the second page of the listings for a particular Google search you completed?
Getting your website into the top ten is critical to your businesses success. Despite Google and other key search engines making constant modifications to the algorithms that drive search rankings, a number of fundamental techniques still exist to get your business moving further up the search results pages. In this blog post we are going to consider a few of the things that your business must start doing if you want to drive consistent organic search traffic to your website.
Determine your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy
In todays competitive web environment it isn’t as simple as just cracking into a range of SEO activities to drive links back to your website. Like any type of marketing, you need to have a well defined and documented plan to guide your SEO efforts. Undertaking random SEO initiatives will deliver random search results.
Keyword research
This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of organic search success. Identifying the right keywords for your business to target. There are a scores of considerations when undertaking keyword research. First you must evaluate the traffic levels of particular keywords – you don’t want to spend your time optimising your site for keywords that have minimal queries. Checking the competition on keyword phrases is important so you are aware of the volume of competing sites, and how well they are optimised. Testing is also important. You may not want to spend time optimising your site for terms that are never going to be ‘buying’ keywords.
Content strategy
I am sure you have heard this before – but the single most important thing you can do to drive search engine dominance is to create high quality, compelling content. Content that your visitors want to read, engage with, share with their communities, or simply link to, will be rewarded by search engines with priority placement. Evaluate your current content performance and strategy today!
Improve your website structure
A website that is structured so it is easy for search engines to crawl is obligatory. However you may be surprised at the number of businesses that do not fulfil the seemingly simple page structure techniques required to optimise rankings. Requirements include the correct use of title or heading tags, meta descriptions, alt tags for when HTML elements can’t be rendered, use of internal links and the optimisation of keyword density and placement throughout the website.
Become social
Social signals impact your website rankings. The presence of social media profiles for your business as well as optimising your content and digital platforms for shares, retweets, +1s and links back to your website cannot be understated. If your business is not currently ‘social’ or is only making a half hearted attempt at it – then it is time to evaluate your social media marketing.
Mobile friendly site
According to Google, the latest changes to their search algorithm favour mobile friendly websites. Having a responsive website that provides a seamless experience for customers no matter what screen size is now mandatory if you wish to preserve or improve your organic search rankings.
If you think this all sounds like a lot of work… then you would be correct! SEO is time consuming and can be hard work if you don’t know what you are doing. But the payback of improving your SEO is worth it! Imagine the benefits to your business of presenting your products and services to customers exactly when they are searching for them, with no additional cost for every click through to your site.