Search Engine Optimisation influences if your web page shows in a search engine, and how high in the results. You can gain advantages by making your website load quickly, write high quality content and have other sites backlink to yours because you provide something of interest. I am a Hereford based web developer and I can help with your website SEO.
SEO for your business
Search engines such as Google and many others are the primary way a new customer might find your online business.
Have you ever wondered why your competitor is at the top of Google? It all comes down to SEO.
SEO is an acronym which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The art of tailoring your website to be more attractive to search engine algorithms.
Imagine you sell “Web Design” services and a potential customer is looking for this exact thing. They might go to Google and type in “Web designer”.
What if your company didn’t show up on Google at all? There’s no way you’d get to sell to that customer, because they don’t even know your company exists. Ranking high on Google lends your business an air of authority because you are being trusted by Google to provide relevant information.
Proper SEO is essential for any online business to thrive, because every business wants to appear on Google search results, and even better, near the first few results. This is a free and constant stream of potential customers. These potential customers also a good conversion rate, as they are searching you out rather than just having an ad placed in front of them. In order for your website to appear here, you need to optimise so that Google deems it a good option to show to the people who search for related topics.
Keywords
Keywords are perhaps the biggest factor in how your site will rank, as these are the search terms a potential customer would use.
An important aspect to SEO is to make each page on your site have a slightly different focus. Imagine a keyword, and then try and tailor your page around that keyword.
The majority of the information related to that keyword should come from this page, not split across multiple others.
This means you do not cannibalise your SEO by trying to rank two or more pages against each other.
Finding your niche
It can be discouraging to see large businesses taking all of the top spots in a Google search when related to your industry. Your business needs to find niche keywords to capitalise upon.
Competitive keywords are usually more generalised such as “Hire an SEO specialist”, or specifically the name of a product or service like “SEO specialist”.
Most competitive keywords are dominated by giant businesses, therefore it is wiser to try and rank in more niche keywords.
Adding the city where your business is based in the content can help, e.g. “Hire an SEO specialist in Hereford”.
Another way to find a niche keyword is to offer a slightly unique twist to stand out, and talk about it on your website. Specialise in a subcategory of your industry to try and find a niche keyword and capitalise on it.
Backlinks
Another factor in how Google views your website is the backlinks – other websites linking towards yours. These backlinks are judged based on the original sites authority, relevancy, popularity and credibility.
Backlinks from sites like the BBC provide a huge boost to SEO because they are deemed so highly valuable by Google, whereas links from Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are given low importance because literally anyone can create a backlink from them.
Page load time and resource hogging
It is important to have a website which performs well, as Google will favour a fast website over a slower one in search rankings. Clogging your page with huge images, unnecessary code and data can bloat your website, and your SEO will take a hit.
Properly sizing your images, cutting redundant scripts, using optimal content delivery strategies such as an image serving CDN and caching can all have a huge positive effect to not only the user’s experience, but Google’s ranking too.
Read on to find out how you can identify website performance issues.
Measuring your SEO effectiveness
Google judges your website based on multiple factors such as how quickly it loads, how accessible it is for a wide range of users and how well it’s made. For a quick way to see a basic view of how optimised your site is, try Lighthouse by opening your site in Google Chrome, open developer tools with F12 and choose the Lighthouse tab.
Run the audit and you will see four scores appear from 0 to 100 based on different metrics. The higher the number, the better your score. Many areas in which your site are lacking will be highlighted by this tool, and most are often actionable fixes by a web developer or content writer.
Another free tool for measuring your sites SEO is Nibbler. Simply enter your URL and test. This tool covers many different aspects of SEO including how important building a social network for your business is for authority and trust.
I’d recommend using Lighthouse in the early stages after launching your site and using Nibbler later once you have tackled all of the more technical and content related issues.
Finally, Google Analytics is an important tool for measuring your SEO effectiveness. It will allow you to see how users first found your site whether through a direct link, Google search, social media referrals or anything else.
What Sleekweb can do for your SEO
- Affordable consultancy and analysis of your site
- Full website development includes SEO set up with 100% lighthouse scores
- Fast hosting from £6 per month or £60 per year