Category: SEO

No matter how much you have spent on your website, and regardless of how awesome your website looks, one thing you must remember is, it is nothing more than a bauble if it doesn’t help to generate revenue for your business.

Now it’s true that some websites are not built specifically for selling and are seen merely as a corporate hub designed to promote the company’s brand. There is nothing wrong with this, especially for large corporations and multi-national organisations; however, for local businesses, websites serve a much different purpose, which, sadly, they often fail to fulfil for a variety of reasons.

Rather than go through a whole list of things that local business websites get wrong, instead let’s take a look at some of the key functions that a local business website should be performing if it is to help that business generate leads, sales, and revenue in order to sustain it.

Now, we want to be very careful with this one, which is to create a good first impression. Please do not think that is the starting gun for you to run off and completely redesign your website into a multi-coloured kaleidoscope of flashing images. The phrase less is more is very prevalent when it comes to the look of a website so don’t use colours and graphics for the sake of it.

What is more important about the visual elements of a website is whether it gives visitors a good first impression and does it look like a website that is going to be easy to navigate. Menus and buttons saying, ‘Click Here’ to the left, right and centre are confusing, and a confused mind always says ‘No’, which means they are out of there.

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If you have researched SEO in any way, you will have undoubtedly discovered a lot of discussions about keywords. Keywords and their importance to SEO have had many business owners scratching their heads, wondering how they work.

Even to those with a modicum of marketing knowledge, keywords can be a source of huge frustration as they try to work out which ones to optimise for and where to have those keywords positioned on their website or on other websites in links back to theirs.

The reason why the positioning of a keyword is so important is that Google has a pecking order of those positions, which their algorithm refers to when calculating the relevancy of the keywords. The pecking order is, in effect, Google’s order of importance and how much weight it gives to a keyword in determining its relevance.

Only Google knows how that order was decided upon, but the consensus amongst SEO experts is that it relates to the difficulty with which anyone building and ranking a website would be able to position a keyword. The harder they think it would be, the more power they give it in terms of ranking for the keyword, and the easier it is, the less power it gets.

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If there is one aspect of SEO upon which more content is written than any other, then, ironically, it is content. Ironically is probably the wrong word to use as ‘Justifiably’ would have been more appropriate, given how important content is to SEO and helping websites rank.  One reason so much is written about content is because it is a very effective way, and in most cases, a straightforward way, of enhancing a website’s SEO, especially in the eyes of Google.

However, its perceived easiness is the main reason why so many business owners get it entirely wrong when they create or purchase content for their websites. The result is it does more harm than good, and the business owner is left scratching their head wondering why. It need not be that way, because if you follow some very simple principles, you can make content SEO friendly, and better than that, you can enhance the experience of visitors to your website, which can only lead to better conversions.

Make It Interesting and Unique

It is hard to fathom, why, to this day, some webmasters and even some SEO consultancy’s who should know better, put content on websites that is no more than filler. It is there for no other reason than to exist with not one iota of thought towards anyone who might wish to read it.

All your content should be created with the intention to satisfy your website visitors first and Google second. The reason is that if you achieve the first, the second will follow. Good content means visitors stay longer, take action and share the content which widens your audience. Google sees all of that happening and therefore rewards you with higher rankings.

Mix It Up

No matter how well-written your content may be, a website that is just page after page of text isn’t going to maximise its potential. Wherever possible, you should include other types of content such as images, infographics, and video. Again, this will appeal not only to your visitors who are likely to remain on your website longer, but Google also likes websites that offer a variety of content.

Effective Hyperlinking

Creating hyperlinks within your content is perfectly allowable in the eyes of Google and indeed they encourage it, but only up to point. Hyperlinks to other pages within your website are seen as an effective way to help your visitors find additional and relevant information, especially if the keyword used within the link is also relevant.

This principle also applies to links to other websites from yours, especially if they are related to what yours is about. It might seem counter intuitive to take visitors away from your website to another, but it does help your SEO.

Legitimate Keyword Density

Hopefully, you are not planning to publish content that is stuffed full of keywords in the hope that will get you ranked for them. In fact, it will have the opposite effect, and could even see your website’s ranking severely compromised as Google hates to see keyword stuffing. By all means, use keywords and keywords phrases in your content, but include them with a frequency that is natural, and when it is relevant to do so within the context of what is being written.

Break It Up

Website content shouldn’t be the same as the text in a book, so instead of having line after line of words, you should use headings and subheadings to break it up. This makes the person reading your content more likely to read on, and by making the headings and subheadings ‘H’ tags, it helps your SEO as Google sees your content properly structured and can also identify relevant keywords.

The internet has billions of web pages, and many of them are competing to be noticed by Google in order to move up the search rankings for that coveted page one of results. There are lots of SEO tactics and strategies that will help achieve this, and one of the most important is optimizing the page for the keywords you want to rank for. Here are some very simple ways to ensure that any, and all web pages on your website have the best chance of improving their ranking with the use of keywords.

Researching Keywords
The mystique surrounding keywords, and how best to optimize for them has led to countless theories and complicated strategies about how it should be done. In reality, optimizing a page for keywords is not that difficult, and only requires some very straightforward actions.

Keywords for SEO
The first of these is to do proper keyword research to establish which keywords and keyword phrases you need to target to be able to challenge those sites which currently occupy the first page of results within your niche. There are numerous keyword research tools available, with the most obvious one being the free AdWords keyword tool that Google offers.

If you really want to dig deep, to the extent that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, how highly they rank for those keywords, and where they are getting backlinks from, paid tools such as Ahrefs can give you all that information. It cannot be stressed enough how important this sort of keyword research is. It can mean the difference between knowing exactly what keywords to target and then creating the content to match versus aimlessly creating content that achieves nothing.

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It is often baffling to see experienced webmasters or website owners who use both SEO and paid advertising (Google Ads), but who never realise they complement each other in so many ways. They are blissfully unaware that by combining both strategies and using some of the data that Google Ads marketing can generate, they could enhance their SEO and rankings further than they already have.

From the outset, we must appreciate that each business’s ability to implement a Google Ads campaign will be tempered by the resources they have, not least of which will be their budget. However, even if you only have the means to set up a few small campaigns, you should do so, for the advantages in relation to your SEO which are set out below.

#1 Gaining Visibility for Keywords at The Top of The SERPs

Whenever you do search on Google at the top of the results you will see three of four listings with a little yellow box that has the word ‘Ad’ in it. This indicates that those listings have used Google Ads to appear there. Apart from the obvious benefit of having a 63% chance of your website link being clicked, being at the top of the paid results can help your organic rankings in the longer run.

Assuming your website is optimised, users who click through will spend time on your site and be clicking through pages, which is seen by Google as a positive. You also gain more authority and trust when you have a paid ad appearing on Google’s results. The goal is to get to the point where you appear at the top of both the organic and paid results. That is when you can really claim to be established.

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