SEO—or Search Engine Optimisation—is an essential digital marketing strategy for generating leads through the internet. If you want to get enquiries online, you need to have top notch SEO. In this blog post, we’ll be walking through 10 components of SEO that contribute to outstanding search rankings. This is SEO Best Practices Explained.
1. Keyword research
Every SEO project begins with keyword research. Essentially, this involves finding the most profitable keywords related to your industry: the ones that your potential customers are frequently searching for on Google. By targeting these keywords, your company website will appear at the top of the SERP (search engine results page) as soon as your prospective client hits ‘search’. This is the goal of every SEO project.
2. Content (and lots of it)
Once you’ve uncovered a list of profitable keywords, it’s time to target them through writing content. Each keyword requires a separate page of content which is where you’ll be greeting your prospective clients. It’s important to leave an impression, so ensure you provide useful information related to the service or product in question, and follow it up with a call-to-action (CTA) at the end. The CTA is your opportunity to guide the user toward making an enquiry.
3. Title Tags
Title tags are the first things customers see when they make a Google search. A title tag is simply the title of each webpage displayed on the SERP, typically including the company name, along with a keyword related to the search. For example,
Universal Web Design | SEO Best Practices Explained.
Title tags form a crucial part of SEO best practices because they clearly state what the visitor will see once they click on the page. Make sure your title tags are clean and simple. The more convoluted a title tag is, the less likely it will appear in search results—let alone be clicked on by a visitor!
4. Meta Description
When it comes to search engine marketing, any feature that provides visibility is automatically valuable. Meta descriptions are the blurbs you’ll see under each webpage listed on the SERP: a brief summary of the webpage’s content (up to 160 characters) that encourages the viewer to click onto the page. Though short, the impact of meta descriptions is massive as they offer additional information to prospective customers as well as to Google itself.
5. Optimise Images
Images are the fastest way to communicate information to people clicking on your website. Nowadays, they make up a sizable portion of all website content. In your SEO plan, image optimisation (also known as ‘alt text’) involves adding a short description of each image’s visual content as another way to ensure you’re targeting relevant keywords. The more images you optimise, the more relevant your website becomes to your business’ online niche and your search rankings will improve as a result.
SEO Best Practices Explained
6. Site Structure
Site structure is a vital part of SEO best practices explained. Simply put, a site structure ranks which webpages are the most important on your website (e.g., your home page, services page, enquiries page, etc.). Once you’ve created a hierarchy between webpages, Google will corroborate this information and rank those pages higher in the SERP. This, in turn, makes it easier for prospective customers to find (and hopefully contact) your business.
7. Internal Linking
Next up, internal linking. Internal linking simply refers to the practice of creating a network of interrelated topics on your website. Basically, it involves stitching together lots of keywords so that Google can understand the relevancy of your website to your business’ given industry. Linking can also relate to collaborating with other company websites within your industry niche as a way to gain credibility in the eyes of Google
8. Optimise for Mobile
50% of people visiting websites are doing so on a mobile phone. If your website is not optimised for mobile, you’ll be missing out on an enormous percentage of total web traffic, and you’ll probably annoy a lot of would-be customers in the process. Ever visited a website from a smartphone and found half the page is cropped out? Eliminating this problem will ensure any customer can access your website, no matter what device they’re using.
9. Page Speed
Page speed—like mobile optimisation—falls under the ‘technical side’ of SEO. Also like mobile optimisation, page speed is an issue that can aggravate prospective customers and make them click off of your website. Ensuring your page speeds are fast greatly increases the user-quality of your website. It will also protect your business from excessive ‘bounce rates’ (the amount of people clicking onto your website, only to click off it 2 seconds later). If page speed is a problem for your website, best ring up some SEO specialists.
10. Website Security
In addition to things like keyword relevancy, Google also ranks websites on their security merits. Online security measures (or lack thereof) affect SEO rankings directly. Does your website abide by standard HTTPS internet protocol? Do you have an SSL (secure sockets layer) established? Without these security features, websites are prone to spam and data breaches, which Google will not look favourably on.
Universal Web Design
At Universal Web Design, we’re specialists in SEO services for small to medium sized businesses. If you’re looking for a way to generate leads online through a marketing plan that doesn’t break the bank, contact our team today. We’ll ensure your search rankings improve, providing quality SEO content for your website that’ll convert prospective customers into certified sales.
For more information, visit our website on www.universalwebdesign.co.uk, email us at sales@universalwebdesign.co.uk, or give us a call on 01206 588 000.