A Simple Guide To SEO
SEO is an increasingly popular subject that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In fact, with 4.4 million blog posts being posted every day in 2019, having an understanding of SEO is more important than ever before.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, an existing brand owner, or a budding entrepreneur, you need to know about SEO to make sure that whatever you’re producing, or planning to produce, actually gets seen.
You can have the most amazing products on your e-commerce store or write the most interesting and informative blogs, but if you don’t have SEO knowledge, you might get lost in the background.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to start a coding course or dedicate half of your week to looking through analytics, the basics are more than good enough, and in this article, that’s exactly what we’re going to share with you.
Welcome to your simple, quick, and easy guide to SEO!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This essentially means increasing the ranking of your site on search engines and increasing the organic traffic that your website receives.
There are hundreds and hundreds of factors that affect your SEO ranking, from page speed to the number of links on your website. However, you don’t need to focus on every single one, and as long as you make sure your website has the basic SEO checklist ticked, you’re miles above everyone else already.
With Google having over 75% of the search engine market share, if you do want to look more closely into SEO, you might want to start with Google’s support console SEO guide.
Create High-Quality Content.
Although SEO can get extremely complicated when you look into it in great detail, as mentioned above, the basics will get you by and boost ranking significantly. So, the first thing you need to do is not overcomplicate it and don’t focus on the wrong areas of your website.
One of the things that people surprisingly tend to not think about when they’re trying to do SEO, is that the content produced has to be of high quality. If you have high-quality content that’s informative and without all the fluff, Google (and other search engines), will appreciate it and boost your ranking, after all, search engines are programmed to find the highest quality websites that are most suited to answer the searcher’s query.
Links, Links, Links.
Links are basically how the entire internet runs, and therefore it’s essential that you focus on them - Google ranks links highly when it comes to SEO analytics.
You should start off by linking within your own website - these are called internal links. If you have internal links across your site, you’re making sure the infrastructure of the site is bulletproof, and Google appreciates that!
However, the best way to use links to your advantage is by getting backlinks, also known as inbound links, to your site. Backlinks are where another website links to your site. Although all backlinks are useful, if you get your link on a site that’s well-known and trusted by Google, your SEO ranking will shoot up.
Know Your Keywords.
Keywords are incredibly important in SEO, as it allows search engines to pair what the searcher types in on the engine to your website. So, make sure you’re really utilising keywords wherever you can.
If you aren’t sure what keywords resonate with your brand, make a list of around 20 words that you would use to search for your brand if you didn’t know your brand name. For example, if you’re a swimwear company, some of the keywords might be, “swimwear, beach accessories, sustainable swimwear’ etc.
If you have a blog on your website, which you should, then you will have a good chance of fitting in an array of keywords - focus on the first few lines of an article, titles and subheadings.
You should also use keywords in your website title and meta description, as well as on page titles and in your URL.
Understand User Experience.
Google, and other search engines, see how people behave when they reach your website, and if they close the page because it’s not loading fast enough or they become uninterested because they can’t find what they’re looking for, your SEO rank will decrease.
You need to make sure that your website loads in at least 2 seconds, but half a second is recommended by Google, so don’t add heavy images or tonnes of fancy design. You also need to make sure your website is simple to use and shows visitors what they’re looking for straight away.
As long as you’re aware of how important SEO is and how to master these 4 basic SEO tricks, you should see increased traffic and higher website ranking over time. If you’re interested in how we could help with your SEO feel to contact us.
