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Beginner’s Guide to SEO

12/22/202403/09/2021 by scmarketing

With over 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, and over 7 billion searches on Google a day, making sure your website is noticed is a must. Which is why it’s important to consider using a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign to improve your online presence and make your website visible.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimising your content to improve its ranking on search engines results pages (SERPs), increasing your website traffic.

Search engines use bots to ‘crawl’ pages to gather information and place these pages in an index, where various factors are analysed to determine where they rank on search engines.

As a business, it’s important that you have a clear outline of what your objectives are before implementing an SEO strategy. Having an idea of what you’re striving towards will help formulate an SEO plan and the steps you’ll take to reach those goals.

If you’re unsure as to what your SEO objectives may be, think about what your business objectives are and how implementing an SEO campaign can help you reach those objectives.

Target audience

Your target audience are the people looking for your business’s services online.

Understanding your target audience is crucial to SEO, as you’re essentially tailoring your website to reach this audience.

A great way to better understand your target audience is to create an online persona. Think of your ideal customer and create a character based on that person – this will become your online persona that helps you tailor your marketing material including website content to target that person.

A few tips to help you create this persona include reflecting on the person’s goals and the challenges they may face trying to achieve them. Think of how your products and services may be the solution for those obstacles. These steps work together to help form a personality that gives you a better understanding of how your audience thinks and how you can market to them.

Our blog has further information to help you create an online persona.

Keywords

Once you have your target audience agreed and in mind, you can start to think of content for your website which will include keywords which will form a vital part of your SEO strategy.

Keywords are words and phrases that search engines use to determine what is on your website. When used properly, keywords can help boost how your website ranks on search engines, driving more traffic to your website.

With keywords it’s all about being specific to your business. With 53% of website visitors coming from organic search, thinking about what your target audience would type in the search engine function is a great place to start to help you create a list of the keywords for your audience.

However, a word of caution, excessive keyword use on a webpage can have an adverse effect on your rankings – this is known as keyword stuffing. So, high quality content should be fresh, unique and relevant to your target audience. Use your researched keywords within your web page which will help search engines understand what is on that page. Using the relevant keywords will ensure that visitors are getting the content they came for and not leaving too soon.

There are a number of keyword research tools online to help you work out what your keywords are, such as the Wordstream and Moz keyword research tools, and our how to improve onsite SEO with keywords blog also provides further insight on keywords.

Meta-descriptions

Another great SEO tip is to improve the quality of your meta-descriptions. The meta-description is a small snippet of text that appears under your webpage on search engines, to act as a summary of what the audience will find on your page and help boost click through rate (CTR) on SERPs. On search engines such as Google, the meta-description appears as a short paragraph below the web page title.

Good meta-descriptions are up to 160 characters and include targeted keywords.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of images on a website is also important and can be done in different ways. One way you can do this is by ensuring that every image has alt text – a written version of what the image contains. This helps:

When the image fails to show up for any unknown reason, as the alt text will be used as a substitute,
Screen readers as they read out the alt text to help the visually impaired better understand the page
Allowing search engines to crawl and rank your website

You should always try to include targeted keywords in your alt text as they’re another indication to search engines that your page is relevant to that search.

Optimising your images also includes making sure that they’re not too large, as the larger an image is the longer it may take to load. This may slow the load speed of your website and increase the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors that visit a page and leave instead of visiting other pages too. Research carried out by Google has shown that 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, further proof that you need to manage image size and load speed.

Link building

Link building is the process of having internal and external links throughout your website content.

Internal links to other pages on your website help by:

Easing navigation around your website
Enabling search engines to crawl your website more easily
Guiding traffic to specific pages
Improving engagement and time spent on your website

While internal link building focuses on connecting pages on your website, external link building is all about your website URL being on other websites which then direct back to your website – also known as a referring domain.

Search engines look at the quality of the links and the quantity to help give you a domain authority score. The domain authority is a report of how relevant your website is in any specific area or market. Websites with a high domain authority score will be seen as a more trusted source and rank higher than those with lower scores, so it’s important to increase your score where possible.

The best way of getting your website on another domain is through online directories and Google My Business is perhaps the most important online directory for you to be on. For more details on Google My Business, visit our Setting up Google My Business blog.

We’ve also listed some alternative directories to help you grow your list of online directories to be featured on.

Web design

How your website is designed has a larger impact on your SEO than you may think. Search engine bots emulate the behaviour of visitors, so if they see that users are leaving your page quickly due to bad user experience, your page will get ranked down. The opposite also applies if visitors have a good user experience your website ranking will increase.

That’s why having a well-designed website can be a strong contributing factor in your SEO strategy. The best websites:

Are easy to navigate
Have fast load speed
Create brand consistency
Are responsive

A responsive website is a website that adjusts its appearance according to the device it’s being viewed on. Websites are not only being viewed on desktop devices, mobile devices account for half of website traffic. This makes it clear that having a responsive website is crucial, as you can’t guarantee what device your website is going to be viewed on. Also, responsive websites load much faster, this improves user experience and helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages – Google certainly favours websites with faster load times.

As a digital marketing agency, we offer web design services tailoring a website to the needs of the business.

Landing pages

An SEO landing page is a specific page on your website used to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages usually have the following:

Succinct content with keywords relevant to your target audience
Bold calls to action (CTA)
Forms – for lead generation
Thank you pages – to continue the conversation and market something else to your leads

Landing pages are a great way to gather data whilst also generating leads. When creating landing pages, it’s important to pay attention to how visitors interact with the web page. For example, if you see that your page has a lot of visits, but the conversions aren’t matching this could mean that the layout of your page needs to be reworked. We would always recommend creating a specific landing page if you progress with a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign.

SEO agency Croydon

There’s a lot to consider but we hope this guide has given you a good overview of the type of activity you can implement to kick start an SEO campaign for your business.

By incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy, you can enhance brand perception and online presence as it helps your business rank better in search engines. This can help generate a better rate of enquiries due to improved visibility.

If you feel you need support in getting your website optimised, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your SEO needs further.

6 SEO tips to improve search ranking

07/07/202005/05/2020 by scmarketing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key digital marketing tactic working invisibly and effectively in the background to help improve your visibility in search engines.

Incorporating SEO into your overall marketing strategy is important right now especially as we’re reliant on the virtual world to shout about our business attributes. What’s key is about generating leads. You don’t want just anyone visiting your site, it’s about quality leads.

To help you achieve this, we’ve gathered together our top tips to kick start your SEO campaign and some refreshers for those businesses who need to revisit this.

1. Review website navigation

To have any success in Google search your website needs to be easy to navigate. This is not just about your menu, it’s the internal links that you include on web pages to help the search engine crawlers to use links and understand the content of your page. Conduct a review of your website to see if you have good quality links directing visitors around your site.

2. Fix broken links

Make sure the internal links on your website work. Think of a search engine as your visitor, it doesn’t want to be sent to a ‘404’ page as much as an actual visitor. It won’t be marked well for you. We can conduct a FREE Website review which will indicate errors such as broken links that you can then fix.

3. Keywords

If you don’t already have a list of words that you want to be found for, then now is a time to conduct keyword research. Spend some time really thinking about what your target audience is searching for to find you. What’s your business offering? How are your services solving a problem for your customers? These types of questions can help you get to those keywords and phrases (longtail keywords) that you then use to create content to optimise your web pages.

When you review your current content against this new list of keywords, there’s a few tips and tricks to implement that will help you stand out in search engines. Use the keyword in the title of your page and if possible, the URL – however this may be too difficult if you have a lot of backlinks already to the pages so you may not want to change them. We would usually aim to place a keyword within the first paragraph.

It’s also key to have your meta description completed and with keyword included. This is the short phrase that you see below the website URL in search results.

4. Review web page URL

Don’t be clever with the name of pages on your website. The URL of your pages should in effect ‘do what it says on the tin’. If you’re an accounting firm and one of your pages is about tax advice, then that should be the URL. It’s the keyword you want to be found for.

5. Link building

You may have articles or comments on other websites which include a link back to your website – in other words a ‘backlink’. Google monitors links reviewing quantity and quality. This helps build a websites’ authority. However, be careful, you don’t want links placed on any website, the emphasis is on quality and relevance to your website.

6. Local SEO

Local SEO can help you target local clients and prospects. Create content that includes information about the specific geographical areas you’re targeting. Also complete your Google My Business page. It helps Google verify your business.

Digital marketing agency

This is just a short overview of just some of the search engine marketing tips you can conduct for website optimisation. If you need help from a digital marketing agency to kick start your SEO strategy and improve your online presence then get in touch with us for your free consultation.

Word in dictionary illustrating keywords

Link building for improved website optimisation

04/09/2020 by scmarketing

One of the most important steps in an efficient search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is link building. You can boost your presence in Google and maximise your Bing results or beyond with a marketing strategy that encompasses link building.

Online results are all about lead generation and therefore traffic to your website. Links on other websites help to drive traffic back to your website.

You may be thinking that your social media posts also have links so is that not enough? While it’s a good start as social media channels provide quality links back to your blog page or service information, having more quality links back from other reliable and trustworthy websites helps add further to your domain authority.

As a business owner, this is something you can start to make headway on during this time of change as we adjust to our different working environments.

Benefits of a quality link building strategy

Here’s an overview of the main reasons you want to implement a link building campaign within your SEO marketing strategy.

Getting lots of useful and relevant links for your website will help search engines position your website in a higher level in the search engine results;
Traffic on your website increases due to the presence of high quality links that point and refer to your website;
Generate more leads if your website is targeted to your audience
Prospects search for your services helping business growth, quality leads and improved customer retention.

Tips to start link building for website optimisation

To create a successful link building campaign to drive traffic to your website you need to take a considered and coordinated approach. It’s not about placing content anywhere. Key link building techniques to consider include:

Create quality content

Quality content is essential to attract your target audience. You need to solve their challenges and provide value. Achieve this through engaging content. Include noteworthy statistics (reference your source where you do), advice, tips that will help their business. It’s about quality over quantity. Make sure the website’s you target are relevant to your target audience and sector.

Be targeted

With content being key to your link building, knowing your target audience is essential. This way you can provide the quality content that they will want to read. Find out about creating an online persona for your business which will help you create engaging content for your target customer.

Be relevant

This is important for search engines. Their goal is to deliver the most relevant results for an enquiry. So, make sure your links point to the most pertinent information on your website. If visitors – your prospective customers – need to click more than once when they reach your web page you’re likely to lose them. Make sure you evaluate the landing page that you will use as the link to your site so that it has relevant information and easy website navigation to help reduce bounce rate.

Quotes and resource lists

Often websites create lists of resources at an end of an article, blog or for key topics. If you have a relevant comment that you think could add to the story or perhaps an article with top tips that you think would be a beneficial resource for the authour’s article then you can contact the authour to ask about being included in the article or offer a guest post. It’s of mutual benefit for both parties if it is relevant information for their audience as long as it’s not salesy.

Guest blogs

Keep an eye on relevant articles and blogs written by people in your industry. Can you add comments to support the story and show your appreciation? This can then lead to you asking if they are interested in a guest blog from you. Research who the key influencers are in your industry to make sure you follow on social media to keep an eye on what they are writing about.

SEO to action now

Link building is a long-term SEO strategy. If you’re embarking on optimising your website now that we are all working more closely with the virtual world, here’s a few resources at the end of the article with some top tips that you can implement now before setting out on the longer link building strategy.

Initially check the internal links you have on your website already. You may find you need to add more links to keywords – words and phrases that you want to be found for. Make sure that these links lead to your core ‘pillar’ pages. Think of it this way, if you visit a website you want seamless navigation so by placing relevant links throughout the page will help you find things quickly.

Also, ensure you have completed as much detail as you can on your Google My Business page. Continue to add images and blog content to it moving forward.

What you’ll find by actioning things like reviewing the content on your website, creating an online persona and completing any missing technical SEO on the backend such as meta descriptions, you will have set yourself up exceedingly well to get link building further.