SEO makes businesses visible
Imagine you open a brand new shop, offering the latest and greatest product - your shop prioritises your customers, it's warm comfortable, aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. It ticks all the boxes! When customers go there, they buy stuff! But herein lies the challenge, your shop was opened in the middle of nowhere! The middle of a desert! No one can find your beautiful shop and all it has to offer.
Does any of this sound familiar or relatable? If you have an amazing, beautiful and easy to navigate website, BUT no one can find it - then what's the point? This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimisation comes in. SEO gives your business the tools to be seen and to show your value to your potential clients. I've seen so many stunning website fail to get the website traffic they deserve and it's frustrating! But there are some simple steps for SEO to make sure you are getting the basics right.
SEO rules of thumb:
- Quality Content:
- One of the most important thing areas you can focus on for your SEO is insuring you have unique, detailed and well written content that really benefits your clients and customers on your website. Google is extremely clever, much more clever then people realise! The Google machine can tell if you content is copied from another source and if the content is valuable to the client. A good place to start is having a look at some of your competitors websites and reading their content - what questions aren't they answering? Where are the gaps? These could inform some new quality content you could produce to differentiate your business from your competitors and add value. - Google My Business & Google Search Console
- I am always shocked when I come across a business that doesn't utilise these two amazing and free Google features. Google My Business is what appears on the right when you are searching for a business in a Google search - it tells the customer essential and important detail about the business and is extremely powerful as free marketing space that shows the client you are professional and established. While Google Search Console has a couple of key features to help Google correctly index your website and show search queries that are triggering your website to appear. - Keywords and Headings:
There is a lot to be said about choosing keywords and headings for your website but let's stick to the basics. Each page on your website offers an opportunity to tell Google who you are and what you do in the form of keywords. Think about the common words/phrases that your customers use to find you or describe you - these will often be your keywords and need to be in the headings on your website. If you are able to edit your website, you can jump on and alter your heading to more accurately represent what people type in to find you. It's also important to remember there are different types of heading (H1, H2, H3...) - H1 being the highest priority. Without getting too far down the SEO rabbit hole, stick to just one H1 heading per page and make that your keyword for that page. Try and organically include the keyword(s) 3-4 times throughout the page. - Make each page themed and focused
This relates to the point above around keywords and headings - but make it clear to customers and Google what the theme of each page is. Here is a simple example: You own a building company with 3 key services - New Home Builds, Renovations & Fence Building. Best practice SEO wise is to have a page each for these 3 services, and have the focus of that page be only that particular service. So you'll have a set of 3 different keywords, targeting 3 different Google searches, on 3 different pages. Simple and focused!
SEO in general can be a bit confusing! But at the end of the day it's about creating the best experience for your customer and doing all the little things right on your end to make sure you are visible to them! We've just scratched the surface here, so if you have any questions please feel free to reach out!
