When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, it is often the case that companies aren’t sure what to do with their website to gain the benefits they want for their business. At Ascensor, we want to make it easier for you and your company to successfully use SEO. So we’ve put together a list of our top 4 must have:
SEO Strategy
We cannot stress enough how much you need to strategically plan your SEO. Images, keywords, alt tags and Metadata are the foundation of your website so it will always be an essential part of your SEO strategy to ensure these are all as well written as possible and include valuable keywords. Changing your site to keep up with the latest Google update is great however you can sometimes feel like you’re chasing your tail. Google’s aim is to display the best possible search results so focusing on how visitors use your website is key, if compared to a competitors your website does not offer more valuable information to help a customer, is more difficult to use and is never updated, your competitor will almost always be above you in the search results.
To succeed long term your strategy has to be customer-centric. You need to be working towards helping the consumer use the site with ease, blogs need to be included to help the user and offer advice rather than to increase your content. In short, if your strategy does not focus on the user, their needs and helping that customer to find what they want, it needs reviewing.
UX - User Experience
UX literally stands for the User Experience. Google has decided that UX is more important than links and better at determining the relevance of the site. Google can take how your browse the internet and turn it into a ranking algorithm, for example, if a user clicks on a site and stays on that site to browse, then later that user searches for that specific sites name, Google presumes that that user had a good experience and they could reward the site. For us it’s fairly simple to measure whether our users are having a positive experience, we can look at bounce rates. If the bounce rate is high then we have to think why is the content engaging enough? Is the layout user-friendly? Can the users navigate the page they land on? If not then these problems need addressing.
Content For Search Engines
Search engines cannot see photos or pictures so can only check the text on your website, therefore the text has to define what the website is about. They use the text you include on your website to decide how high you should rank for specific keywords or phrases, which people search for through search engines. Researching keywords is pivotal, it’s the best way to ensure natural search engine placements and more traffic to your site.
SEO Development
Finally, development, to continue developing your SEO we have 6 top tips for you to remember:
- Remember to write for your target audience – engage with your audience and keep them on your site
- Develop your content so it is unique and interesting – make sure you are creative
- Write for the web – be snappy and section out your content with interesting headings so users can easily find what they are looking for
- Choose the right keywords – use your keyword research and make sure you are getting the highest quality traffic
- Place your keywords carefully – make sure you don’t saturate your content with keywords and they are integrated into appropriate places
- Keyword competition – check your keyword competition, if one word or phrase gets a lot of traffic but there’s a lot of competitors fighting for it then it will be harder to gain visibility.