Who needs SEO? If you’re a small business owner, chances are you might not have given SEO much thought, especially if you’re constantly trying to juggle different aspects of your business. Well, we’re here to say it’s worth paying attention to, if you want your business to thrive online. And who doesn’t these days?
Investing in a long term search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy is a smart way to increase your online presence, and of course boost your organic search rankings, so you can be found by more people looking for products or services you offer.
If you’re someone who knows nothing about SEO, or want to dive in but don’t know where to begin, then here are a few tips to help you get started. If you’re confident enough, you can implement some of these changes yourself straight away, otherwise you may want to seek professional SEO advice.
1. Assigning keywords and phrases
Without focusing on certain keywords, it’ll be hard for people to find you on search engines. What kind of keywords do you want to rank high for? Once you have an idea (we recommend enlisting some help to generate your keywords and phrases), you can apply it your website where search engines are most likely to look.
This includes your:
- Title tags and Heading (H) tags
- Meta descriptions
- URL strings
2. How relevant is your content?
Google loves fresh and more importantly relevant content. There’s no point having content on your site unless it speaks to your target audience. Spend time developing quality content, or get in touch with a professional content writer who can turn your knowledge into interesting content.
Starting a blog is also a great way to generate regular content on your site, and give your audience a reason to come back. Just be sure you have the resources available to keep it from becoming stagnant.
A search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy is a smart way to increase your online presence, and of course boost your organic search rankings.
3. Is your website secure?
A website with HTTPS is a secure website. With online security becoming increasingly important, it makes good business sense to protect the confidentiality of data on your site. And it’s now considered best practice for Google, who is putting its foot down. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, your website will be labelled as ‘not secure’, which in turn will negatively impact your ranking.
4. Check for broken links
Link maintenance sounds like a chore but it’s important to do, and it’s easy to check if you have Google Analytics (which you should because it’s free). If you have broken links on your site, search engines will determine this as an abandoned, old site and it will ultimately effect your ranking.
5. Loading… still loading…
A website that loads quickly not only improves the user experience but it’s also something that Google and other search engines consider when ranking sites. It pays to check how long it takes for your website to load. If it’s longer than a few seconds get in touch with our digital consultants and they’ll sort you out!
6. Image optimisation
All images on your site should have alt tags. It enables screen readers and search engines to know what your image is about, so it’s always good to naturally integrate your keywords into the image titles. It also helps to reformat your images for the web. Use a PNG file format to avoid images with big file sizes, which will impact on your page loading speed.
7. Develop an internal link strategy
A what now? What we’re talking about here is linking to various pages within your site to improve the user experience, but it’s also a clever SEO tactic. Ask us why and we’ll happily explain it to you.
8. Set up a Google My Business profile
Setting up your own profile with your business details will help you appear in local Perth search results. It’s free and doesn’t take long to do.
9. Get social
Sharing your content on social media is a great way to build your online presence, so if you’re not in the social media space yet – get on with it. You need to be practical with how much you can manage, and it pays to have a social media strategy behind you, so you’re not just jumping all in. Being social increases the chances of gaining backlinks to your website, which is a huge factor for achieving that first page ranking on Google.
10. Mobile Friendly
Having a mobile friendly website goes without saying. More and more people are using mobile over desktop as their preferred browser device, and so it’s no surprise Google focuses heavily on mobile optimisation.
Final thoughts
We won’t lie, SEO takes time and you need to be dedicated to see it through to realise the benefit of it. And we’ve only just skimmed the surface. Unless you have the resources for an in-house SEO expert, we always recommend outsourcing your SEO so that you can set and forget, knowing it’s all happening in the background without you even having to lift a finger.
If this sounds like a goer to you, give the crew at Cloud Cartel a hola and see how SEO can help your business soar.
