Whatever line of business you’re in, you could always benefit from more website traffic. Website traffic, if managed correctly, will then convert to sales. But how do you go about getting more visitors onto your business website?
One of the most effective ways of bringing traffic to your site is search engine optimisation (SEO). If you don’t currently have an SEO strategy, then you’re missing out.
While there are, of course, plenty of companies out there that can handle your SEO needs, having your own SEO content strategy will help you boost your website authority and, as such, yield better performance in the search engine results pages also know as SERPs.
In this article, we’ll suggest ten great SEO strategies for small businesses to grow website visitor numbers and push you to the top of the SERPs.
1. Optimise Your Site for Mobile Devices
Did you know that over half of the world’s population are smartphone users? Chances are, many of your customers are trying to access your website using a mobile device such as a smartphone or a tablet.
But what happens if your site isn’t optimised for mobile devices? If your site isn’t optimised, the simple fact of the matter is that you’ll lose out on visitors.
Un-optimised sites will leave your visitors struggling to read text or see images. Everything will be the wrong size and in the wrong place.
But the likes of Google know this fact. For this reason, they’ll penalise sites that aren’t optimised, and you’ll appear lower in the search results,
Ensure your images all load to the size of the device’s screen and that text is clearly legible.
2. Speed Up Your Website
Nobody likes to wait around for a slow website to finally finish loading. If a site isn’t loading quickly enough and there are alternatives out there, you can bet that users won’t stick around to see whether your site loads. They’ll be clicking the back button and heading straight to your competitors’ site.
For this reason, it is essential that you have a fast and responsive website.
Use Google’s Page Speed Insights to give you the rundown of how your site stacks up in terms of page loading speeds. If your site isn’t up to speed, then you’ll get given a series of instructions to follow to boost your speed in the future.
A few of the changes you could make include introducing caching, using a lazy load plugin, uninstalling and removing unused themes and plugins, and compressing your images.
If you have a WordPress website, then there are a lot of easy to use plugins that can help you speed up your website page speed, or, you can engage with a professional SEO company to help you.
3. Fix Broken Links
It happens from time to time. You place a link to a useful resource or a page elsewhere on your site, and later on, the page gets deleted. This can leave you with a link that goes nowhere. It’s not great for your visitors, and as a result, it’s not so great for your SEO strategy.
But when you have hundreds of pages on your site and thousands of links, how do you go about routinely checking all of these links to make sure they all lead to the resource that you intend it to?
Using a broken link checking plugin, you’ll be able to see all problem links meaning you can address them one by one. You can either fix the broken link by removing the hyperlink completely, or you could find an alternative page to link to.
4. Have a Keyword Strategy and Carry Out Keyword Research
Keywords are essential in your SEO strategy. They help users find your site. Without keywords, your site will languish in the parts of the SERP where nobody looks.
You need to think about what visitors may be searching for. Brainstorm some suggestions of what you think your visitors may be looking for, then carry out some keyword research around these terms.
There are many different keyword research tools out there; however, Google’s Keyword Planner may be helpful. Another helpful technique involves looking at the related searches section of Google and looking at the keywords your competitors are using.
When trying to rank for a keyword, you’ll need to factor in the possibility that thousands or even millions of pages will also come upon the same search. Try to find keywords that will have the right level of searches made, but that isn’t difficult to rank.
5. Write for Humans
It can be very easy to implement your SEO content marketing strategy to focus all of your attention on pleasing the algorithms that govern your ranking factors. After all, you need to please them to get your site to rank high in the SERPs.
It’s important not to lose sight of what is most important in any SEO strategy, and that is the person reading your content.
Whether you’re creating web copy for your site or updating your blog, first and foremost, you’ll need to write for the person reading the piece. That means writing in a clear and insightful manner.
Avoid practices such as keyword stuffing. It’ll make your content difficult to read. And, the search engines will know that nobody will want to read your content too, and you’ll get ranked lower as a result anyway.
Chatter Digital offer professional content writing services to help you deliver quality articles to your audience – we are a small, but committed team of content writers. Or if you want to research the market a bit more, why not take a look at popular content and SEO platforms like Fat Joe.
6. Have an SEO Backlink Strategy
Having other sites link back to you will tell search engines that your content is an authority on the subject and worth taking a look at. You can implement a great SEO backlink strategy by creating authoritative, comprehensive content and that reads well.
By doing this, it’ll make your content more linkable.
You may wish to put a technique into action to guest post on sites with good domain authority. By doing this, you’ll benefit greatly from their link juice.
Another option is to list your business on local and national directories. No only can these listings drive you website visitors directly, in many cases they will build good quality links for your website. Having consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) citations on your business listings is also an important part of your local SEO strategy.
A final option to consider is a press release for your business. We can write your press release and have it release across hundreds of major news outlets around the world, or within your country of operation.
7. Keep Your URLs Simple
Keep your URLs short and sweet. The simpler they are to read, the better it’ll be for your SEO strategy and anyone visiting your site.
Some of the factors that’ll affect your SEO are:
- The complexity of your URL
- How many subfolders there are
- Whether words are repeated
- The use of symbols
If your URLs are too long, your site will be more likely to get disorganised, and the search engines won’t necessarily crawl your site.
8. Write Fantastic Meta Description
The meta description is the first thing that your visitors will see of your site when scanning through the SERPs looking for a suitable site to visit. Your meta descriptions need to be great.
Meta descriptions are the short snippets about the page that appear in the search results. You should include your focus keyword in your meta descriptions, as well as a call to action that prompts readers to visit your site.
Don’t treat writing your meta description as an afterthought. You’ll need to put effort into making them snappy. Remember, you only have between 120 and 160 characters to entice potential visitors to take the plunge, so make them pop!
9. Optimise Your Image Alt Text
The image alt text sits in the picture’s position and appears if the page fails to load fully and the image isn’t present.
This lets users know what would have been there, assuming the page had loaded fully.
The text also helps visually impaired visitors. Screen-reading tools will be able to describe what image is present.
Finally, the image alt text helps the search engines when it comes to crawling your website.
You can use a short description of the image. You should try to include your focus keyword in your image alt text.
10. Carry Out Regular Content Audits
Roughly once a year, you should revisit your content and carry out an audit on it. Reevaluating your content will help to ensure that it’s still as relevant as when you wrote it and is worth keeping.
If your content is no longer relevant, you have two options. You can either delete it or you can revise it to make sure it is as relevant as possible.
Doing this will help keep your site fresh and maximise your SEO potential.
Getting Help With Your SEO Strategy
There are lots of things you can do to improve your website authority. From implementing a keyword research strategy to improving your page load speeds, an SEO strategy is broad and encompassing.
You needn’t struggle alone trying to juggle all of the elements of your SEO strategy. If you are just starting out in SEO, we have compiled an extensive glossary of SEO terms to help you understand all the jargon.
While it’s important to know and understand what is involved in optimising your site, you can always bring in the pros to help you.
Chatter Digital is here to help you with your SEO needs. Get in touch today to learn more about how we can help you.
