Improve your website’s SEO with these 8 top tips

With over 5.6 billion searches a day, I don’t need to explain the importance of ranking well on Google. Imagine all the possible customers you lose out on daily because you are not visible when they look are looking. This prompts the age-old question from the day SEO became a thing, how do I rank well. Unfortunately, this is a topic that nearly every marketer has an opinion on and there are a lot of wild theories out there. It doesn’t help that Google releases an update every time you feel you’ve got your head around it. Fortunately, this article will show you 8 top tips that are tried and tested, ensuring to improve your website’s SEO.

Increase Your Load Page Speed.

There are many metrics Google will use to evaluate the relevance of your page, we’ll be covering a few of them in this blog. One of these key factors is page load time. As a result of developments in wi-fi and hardware, we have been conditioned to want information promptly, naturally, google wants to know if your website can provide this. You may be wondering, how slow is too slow. Well, Google dictates that if your website takes longer then 3 seconds to load, 40% of your people will abandon the site. What’s worse is that 80% of those visitors won’t come back.

By increasing your website’s speed, you increase other metrics such as engagement and bounce rate. This increase in popularity will showcase to google the relevance of your site and improve your website’s SEO. Increasing load speed can be quite a long and complicated task, so if you need more help there are plenty of fantastic resources such as https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-speed.

Start Blogging.

You may have heard this one and thought it’s more hassle than it’s worth, let me assure you it’s not. Not only does it help with the consistency that search engines crawl your site, but it can also help with user engagement, lead generation and the length of time people stay on your page. In addition, if you’re providing value to people you will see an increased amount of traffic for people looking for it. This will help you build up a loyal audience and email base that would be great for your business.

Make Writing Readable

This follows on from the importance of creating valuable content, you need to make it readable. This doesn’t mean make it condescendingly difficult to understand, you need to make it readable for everyone. People will naturally value and connect with your content more if they can understand it, this will then improve bounce rate and visit length, yet again helping improve your website’s SEO. There are plenty of resources to help you assess your readability online, such as https://readable.com/.

Provide A Variety Of Content Types

One useful way of proving loads of value to visitors is providing content in a range of mediums. People don’t want to spend the majority of time on your site reading, try adding in some alternatives such as images, videos, infographics and audio. You probably won’t be shocked to find out that 68% of consumers prefer to digest information through video rather than text, I know this speaks for me. When understanding this, It’s clear to see why when you have videos and pictures on your website, you see an increase in the amount of time people spend on your website. This as we know helps search engine crawlers assess your site as relevant.

Key Words

If you’ve ever searched the words SEO into google, I’m sure you are familiar with Keywords. These are such an important aspect of SEO It’s filled up books on the topic alone, the best I can hope for in a paragraph is to steer you in the right direction. The most important requirement for keyword success is research, you need to make sure your understanding aspects such as pillar pages, topic clusters and focusing on relevant content.

For those who already have a keyword strategy but don’t know if it’s working too well, make sure you: 

• Put them in your header tags
• Use them in alt text for images
• Use long-tail keywords

Titles And Meta Tags

Even if you get to the top page in google, you’re still competing against 9 other websites. That is why it’s crucial to make sure you have strong titles and meta tags. The tricky part of this is google only gives you 65 characters for the title and 160 for the meta tag.

Here are some important considerations when writing your titles:

– Make sure it’s consistent with your page – Don’t lie to people about the contents of your page.
– Put keywords at the front – people may stop reading after the first few words.
– Like before, make it readable

Important considerations when writing meta tags

– Make them descriptive
– Make them unique
– Keep them short

Correct Contact Information

This seems like a simple one and I’d be surprised if you didn’t have this already. If you don’t then it’s a pretty quick fix. There are a lot of spam sites out there so one-way google determines a sites legitimacy and relevance is by checking for contact information. It’s also important to consider where you put the details if customers can’t find it neither can Google.

Create Backlinks

Backlinks, for those who are unfamiliar, are links from another website to yours. Google thinks of this as a vote of trust from a website that yours holds good value. These can help improve your website in the eyes of search engines, as it shows you are a website many believe to be helpful and will direct customers your way.

There are a few main ways to get backlinks, the first of which is free listings on website directories. These can be a great quick and easy way to gain some trust from Google. These are websites that allow you to register your URL with them, creating a link. But as many people have started doing this, it’s important to make sure the websites you register with are good quality sites and don’t look spammy. Another way to gain links is through guest posting. This is where you submit, work such as blogs that include links, to another website to publish. This can be a great way to gain links from trustworthy websites but can normally cost money to get work published, so make sure it’s worth it.

I hope you have enjoyed this article and feel better equipped to improve your website’s SEO.  Remember that SEO is a long term process and it’s important to keep working at it. If you would like any further help, don’t hesitate to contact us Here.

Details:  

Written by Matt on behalf of ClearBrand, December 2020.

To get in contact about working with ClearBrand on a project,
please call +44 (0)118 959 9284 or email info@clearbrand.co.uk.