With currently more than 8.5 billion searches a day, it’s hard to imagine a time when people weren’t so dependent on Google or any other search engine. But that’s okay, since businesses like yours can take advantage of this increasingly important opportunity with these three words – Search Engine Optimisation.
As internet dependency increases, so does your chance of reaching your target market. All you have to do is to optimise for search engines. This article will explore ways to do this, especially if you’re a beginner in SEO and the digital marketing world in general.
Mind Your Performance
First and foremost, making sure your website performs as expected is a top priority. No one wants to linger on a page that takes forever to load. Forever, in this case, is anything longer than a few seconds. In fact, that may already be pushing it.
Award-winning digital marketer Neil Patel suggests compressing images, using browser caching, and minimising your HTML coding, to bring up your page speeds. You can also re-evaluate your web hosting arrangements to see where you can improve.
Enhancing your site’s performance also means ensuring your pages are optimised for mobile users. According to the previously cited Oberlo article, up to 63% of organic search traffic in Google comes from mobile devices.
Make the necessary changes and test your published site often (using multiple devices to make sure that everything is working well).
Improve Your Content
Search engines like Google have become good at understanding the context with which searches are made. It means they are now more adept at comprehending what the user is truly looking for. Having content that offers real value to the readers is a big plus.
Try creating longer posts of 1,000+ words, that delve into the topics your target market is interested in. Like Google, your understanding of search intent equips you with the right tools to offer help.
Take Advantage of Keywords
Having good content is a good step, but you can take it further by optimising your content using the right keywords. Tools like Ahrefs can help you determine the best keywords that will matter to your audience and your industry.
It’s advisable to use more specific, long-tail keywords. Apart from having less competition, these longer keywords let you hone in on your target market at opportune moments of their search.
Keywords are also extremely useful in optimising title tags, metadata, and your pages’ URLs. These are your site’s way of introducing your content and your pages to potential visitors, so make sure they are also accurately written.
Build Links
In digital marketing, the link-building practice serves the following purposes:
- Outbound links – Linking to other websites adds value for users. It also helps search engines get a clearer picture of what your page is about.
- Backlinks – This is done by having other websites link to your pages. For both users and search engines, this helps establish your website as a credible source. Backlinks essentially count as votes for your pages.
- Internal links – Linking to some of your other pages helps keep users on the site. The longer they spend navigating your site, the better it looks for search engines.
Conclusion
While there are other SEO strategies you can employ to improve your ranking on the search results, the items listed here are the most accessible ones for those starting out. If you want more information on the topic, you can explore our other resources. Better yet, you can reach out to our team by filling out the form on our contact page.
The Vaccoda team is made up of specialists from different fields of digital marketing. We love helping small to medium-sized businesses get ahead with our services.
