If you’ve researched creating a website or have set one up already, you’ve no doubt come across search engine optimisation, or SEO.

Effectively using SEO can make your website easier to find online, driving up traffic and business sales but if you’ve not used the technique before, it can leave you perplexed and overwhelmed by terminology.

SEO is basically a technique used to improve a website’s search engine rankings. With so many websites and competing businesses now online, having a robust SEO strategy in place can make a huge difference. After all when was the last time you went to the second or third page of Google’s results? Making your website easier to find can lead to more traffic and more sales, therefore improving your revenue.

Before you start SEO activity on your business’ website make sure it is functional and appeals to your target audience. If it’s not, potential customers will quickly click off it despite finding it. Ensure your content is clear and website is well maintained, not only will broken and invalid links frustrate customers they can affect SEO too.

Regular Updates

Updating regularly is one of the key things a business can do to improve their SEO. Aim to add new content every few days. A simple way to do this is to include a business blog, where you can share business updates, industry news and other content your customers will find interesting and useful. Make sure all your titles, headers and pieces of text are clear and use your keywords in a natural manner. Content should be unique and aim to provide at least 300 words. Mix this up and publish longer pieces sometimes too.

Link Building

Building links can improve SEO as well by establishing your business as trustworthy and a voice of authority. While it can be tempting to spam sites with links to your business go for quality over quantity. The important thing is relevance – a link from your local newspaper or an industry website is more valuable than a 10 free links from general online directories.

A huge amount of online research and business is now done on mobile devices and this isn’t only useful for increasing your sales, it helps with SEO too. Google’s algorithm for instance will consider if your website can be viewed on mobile phones or tablets.

Finally, use analytical tools to see where most of your traffic is coming from. There are lots of free tools online, such as Google Analytics, that can provide you with valuable insight as to what is working and what needs improvement.

Top tips for improving SEO:

• Use keywords throughout your website. Your keywords should reflect what people would search to find a business like yours.
• Create a plan for when you will update your website and publish new content and stick to it. How frequently your website is updated has a large impact on its search engine rankings.
• Monitor your success and make sure you keep an eye on what is working. The internet is constantly evolving and your SEO strategy should too, check out how search engines are changing their algorithms and reflect this in your techniques

Woya digital is a social media marketing agency in Chichester, that can assist companies of all sizes, anywhere, promote themselves through the internet. Our fixed price offering is straightforward and yields results! We are fantastic at social media management, website design and SEO, all paid monthly, with no upfront investment.

Once you’ve set up your website you need to make sure it’s easy for customers and clients to find.

Even if you’ve developed an incredible website that perfectly encapsulates your brand, it’s not going to have any impact if people aren’t visiting it.

One way to make sure you’re found online is to use keywords in your website content.

Content

When you’re creating a website you’ll need to create content to fill it with. This could be information directly related to your business, such as product descriptions, or other written content, such as blog posts. Blog posts are an excellent way to keep your website updated and fresh, connect with your audience and improve how prominently your site appears on search engines like Google by offering valuable content.

Keywords

Firstly, you’ll need to consider what your keywords are. These will be different for each business and could even change as your business grows and develops. For example, if you’re a florist operating in London your keywords could include ‘florist London’ and ‘wedding flowers London’.

Think about what your potential customers would be searching if they were looking for a service or product you offer. Create a list of between five and 20 keywords for your business and regularly review these to see if they still fit with what your business does.

When it comes to writing the content, it’s a good idea to include some keywords in the headers, sub-headers and introduction. This will help with making the website easier to find through search engines and useful for people that are skim reading. While you want to incorporate keywords into the actual content you’re writing you don’t want to do it too much. Remember that you want to add value and therefore it needs to be readable and enjoyable rather than just a sales tool.

Top tips for key-wording your website content

• Start a business blog. There’s lots of reasons to start a business blog but offering valuable content that uses keywords to make you easier to find online is just one great motive for setting up yours.
• Keep a list of your keywords handy when you’re writing your content so you can refer to it.
• Aim for around 2-5% of your content to be made up of keywords. If you add in too many it can make the content unreadable and seem forced and readers will quickly become bored and look elsewhere.
• Remember to use keywords as tags for your content.

Woya digital is a social media marketing agency in Chichester, that can assist companies of all sizes, anywhere, promote themselves through the internet. Our fixed price offering is straightforward and yields results! We are fantastic at social media management, website design and SEO, all paid monthly, with no upfront investment.