The most important function of SEO is to improve the visibility of your website. Your website must be detectable when someone searches for your company, product or service to gain traction.
This visibility is gained by SEO (search engine optimisation) or SEM (search engine marketing).
To run a successful online business your SEO must be perfect to enable your potential customers to find and buy from you.
There are several things you can do to your website to optimise the visibility on search engines.
The main things are:
- Strong Content
- Ease of Navigation
- Speed
- Mobile Optimisation
- Blog posts
- Social Media
- Site Errors
As well as improving your SEO the things above can also build your brand awareness, improve your relationship with prospects and position yourself as a trustworthy expert in your field.
If we look at the above in more detail:
Strong Content
Keywords are a major focus for search engines to pick up on content in websites. Focus on these keywords such as in your blog posts, your web title and within the body of text ranks more highly than no repetition.
Although the content is also required to be engaging to your customers to ensure they stay on the page and don’t just jump around the site.
Ease of Navigation
When designing a website, it must be easy for your users to navigate. For example, the ideal amount of clicks a user should make to get to a certain page should be 3 or fewer, enabling your prospects to find exactly what they require in as few steps as possible.
If you do have a site which consists of thousands of pages this may be impossible to do, however, you can have cross links between pages rather than just having content hierarchies.
Speed
Research shows the longer it takes to open a web page the less likely a potential customer is to return to that page. Time is important to your buyers, the less time they spend waiting for a page to load the better.
Having a web page which loads within 2 seconds will enable the prospective buyer to stay on that page longer and also come back to that page in the future increasing your SEO.
Mobile Optimisation
All websites should now have mobile optimisation as a standard as over 52% of websites are now viewed on mobile devices and this is rapidly increasing year on year.
If your website is not mobile optimised, this is something to amend as there is a high chance visitors to your website are leaving as they are unable to view it on the device they are using.
Blog Posts
Blogs help your website to rank highly within SEO. A blog shows your expertise in your field so you can establish yourself as a go to person or business.
Your blog can answer questions your customers may have about your products and services and can be linked to the relevant pages too.
Social Media
Social Media supports your SEO ranking through your content promotion. Social Media is a great way to share your blog posts, offers, pages, updates etc.
Social Media may not directly affect your SEO however any promotion you do of material will definitely indirectly improve your rankings by increasing the volume of customers accessing your site.
Engagement can be high through Social Media, any posts you share can be shared between others and create a rapid increase in people accessing your website.
Site Errors
Site errors and broken pages / links can impact your SEO as these areas are then not viewed by Google. For example, if there is a link to or from your website which is inaccurate then you’re not receiving the views you should be.
There are many free auditing checks that companies offer so you can see where the errors are occurring on your website and you’re then able to rectify any issues.
If you’d like to discuss this further, please do contact us at Paramount Web Technology – +44 (0) 1883 330835.
