If you’re looking to improve your website and introduce SEO into your strategy, this beginners guide will explain the best first steps.
However, if you still don’t feel confident in doing the best job possible, there are plenty of agencies who can help. Simply search SEO Essex to find a local company offering SEO services to help boost your rankings and watch as your website’s traffic begins to grow.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, SEO for short, is a way to organically (without paying) boost your visibility on search engines and increase your website traffic. The higher you are on Google etc, the more likely customers are to come across your website.
The most effective ways to improve your SEO is through keyword research relevant to your industry, good quality content, link building and improving the useability of your website.
How Does it Work?
Google will crawl websites to match content to relevant keywords. It will rank web pages based on this, showing the most relevant web pages first on the search engine. It’s your goal to rank as high as possible for keywords related to your audience’s search queries.
To do this, it’s key to understand your audience’s search habits and the words they use for this, as well as the type of content they interact with.
Why is SEO Important?
SEO isn’t the only way to generate traffic to your website, you can use social media and paid adverts to do this. However, a big chunk of website traffic is done through search engines. And since SEO is organic, it’s a great opportunity to get results which are cost-effective.
To be found by customers online, your website needs to be visible. SEO is what makes this possible. By ranking highly for relevant searches, customers are more likely to come across your website.
Once you get SEO right, it will continue to pay off over time. This makes it an investment that’ll continually help your organic traffic.
What Determines Your Ranking?
You can improve your SEO in a range of ways. A good place to start is by making sure your website has the following:
- Good quality website content.
- The relevance of keywords to your content.
- Your website pages are user-friendly with good page speed.
- ALT text on your images to describe the image.
- Good quality backlinks to your website.
- Social shares.
- Relevant and clear page titles with good use of relevant keywords.
What Will Harm Your SEO?
There are certain tactics to avoid when it comes to SEO, as this can harm your rankings. Google is becoming smarter and will penalise websites trying to use ‘black hat’ SEO tactics.
- Using duplicated (such as copied and pasted from another website) content.
- Having website pages with very little content.
- Link schemes.
- Keyword stuffing (overuse of a keyword to try to trick Google into ranking the page higher, especially if it isn’t relevant).
Key SEO Terminology
When conducting SEO research, you may come across certain phrases and key terms. Some of the most popular terms are as follows:
- Duplicate content: Using the same content from another website or duplicating your own content on multiple pages on your website.
- Backlinks: These are links from other websites to yours and helps build your domain’s authority. This will help Google see your website as an authority.
- Keywords: These are words and phrases users type into search engines to find specific websites, products or services. The higher you show up for certain keywords, the more clicks you’re likely to get.
- Outreach: Getting in touch with writers, journalists and bloggers to include your website in their content.
- URL: This is the web address of the page including its domain name.
- Mobile friendly: Making your website mobile friendly means your website can be easily viewed on any mobile device, increasing your authority.
Climb the Search Rankings
SEO is an integral part of digital marketing, so if it isn’t part of your strategy already you could be missing out on lots of potential sales.
With the right knowledge, it’s possible to organically grow your traffic by climbing the search results on Google. If you require further help, get in touch with a local agency by searching SEO Essex where you will find experts who can do the hard work for you.
