5 Tips for SEO Success

Creating and delivering an ongoing SEO strategy for your business will allow you to increase traffic from your target customers to increase sales and grow your overall revenue.

Gemma, our Head of Marketing, provides her top SEO tips.

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What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of getting traffic from the ‘organic’ search results on search engines. It is crucial to the success of your website, whatever your goal might be i.e. generating incoming sales leads, being seen as an authority in your industry or providing information for your existing clients.

Your website needs to be found easily and by the most relevant key terms. For example if you’re running a chinese takeaway you don't want to target the (short tail) keyword ‘chinese’ because the results you get will be varied and could actually be related to anything, instead you could target ‘chinese takeaway’ or as we want really specific customers who are searching for your product or service (we call this long tail) you might target ‘chinese takeaway southampton’.

As users…

• We’re short on time
• We expect the first result to be the one we’re looking for
• We’re impatient, if we don’t see the result we want we’ll leave...
• Google want to provide the BEST possible experience
• They want to serve up relevant results
• They want you to click

• It makes them a winner as well as you!

My top 5 tips for achieving SEO success are:

1. Focus on content

• Your content has to be unique
• Don’t create content on everything, focus on specific topics where you are most experienced
• Provide a range of light level and deep content
• Mix up the content types
• Utilise video, text articles, imagery, infographics

• Use themes that run over time and utilise 'episodes' or 'instalments' to keep people coming back for more...

2. Optimise your title tags and meta descriptions

• This is what shows in Google when you search for a website
• This information must compel the user to click on the result
• Include your target keyword in your title and description
• It has to be appealing, evoke curiosity

• These should be unique for each and every page on your website

3. Optimise your images and videos

• Google doesn’t just allow text searches
• There are tabs for ‘Maps, ‘Images’, ‘Videos’ and even ‘Shopping’
• These offer the potential to increase your exposure
• Use them, each and every one of them
• Optimise your videos on YouTube - use the title, description and tags to your advantage

• Research the keywords on YouTube, how many searches, how many results are there? What videos are coming up for those searches and are they of relevance?

4. Social media channels engagement is important

They used to tell us it wasn’t... but it is…

• You need to have social media channels that are linked to your website and properly branded.
• Consistently post unique content
• Always engage, respond, like and reply to users who engage with you

These social signals send Google a very clear message that you providing a good service and it allows their algorithm to grab hold of this and boost you up the search results

5. Good user experience is important

If users come to your website and can’t find what they are looking for they will bounce straight back off without completing any actions.

If they don’t read your content or your site isn’t well optimised for mobile and has a million pop-ups that get in the way of user engagement you’ll take a knock in the SERPS.

So...

• Take a step back and review your website
• Navigate it fully on mobile - I bet you’ll find a number of issues...

• carry out some user testing - ask the users to find specific pieces of content as well as feeding back about the overall ease of navigation and user experience

Your website should be an evolving piece. Don’t launch and think that the job is done, onto the next. Your website should grow and develop with your business, fresh content should be added regularly, images and videos should be refreshed and your service information should be kept up to date.

Use your website as a tool to generate success.

To conclude, here are my top tips on achieving SEO success:

• Focus on content
• Optimise your title tags and meta description
• Optimise your images and videos
• Social media engagement IS important
• Provide a good user experience

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