5 Ways to Improve Your Website’s SEO To Succeed in an Online World
Improving your website SEO is essential for ensuring business success online. SEO ensures your website can be found by the right people so that you can win more visitors, higher engagement levels, and the chance to convert more users into customers.
In this article, we will be looking at 5 ways you can improve your website’s SEO to help your business succeed in an online world.
What is SEO?
Firstly, we need to discuss what SEO is and how it can help your website. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is a form of marketing that helps increase the visibility of your website in search engine results so you can attract a wider audience, increase engagement, and most importantly, convert visitors into customers.
Without SEO, it is highly unlikely your website will be findable on Google. SEO ensures that when people search for terms related to your brand, your website can be found. The more discoverable your site is and the better optimised for the user, the higher your chances of increasing your sales.
SEO is a powerful marketing tool and is essential if you want to succeed in an ever-competitive online world. So, let’s take a look at 5 ways you can improve your website’s SEO.
1. Begin by Analysing the Data
If you want to optimise your website productively, it’s important to begin with data. Whether analysing data is your thing or not, it can provide you with invaluable information about your website, your audience, and the best improvements to make to yield the desired results. Without data, you’ll be approaching your website’s SEO blindfolded and could spend time making changes that aren’t actually productive for your business or helpful to your audience.
Tools like Google Analytics collect website data that provides priceless insights into your website by reporting on what’s working and what isn’t. If you have been collecting data for at least a year, you should start to notice patterns in audience behaviour, trends in your content, and better understand your conversion rate.
Once you have the data you need, you can start making productive changes to your site. For example, if the data shows you have a low conversion rate you can focus your efforts towards optimising conversions. Alternatively, if your website has a high bounce rate, you can focus your efforts on increasing user engagement through improved site usability, higher content quality, and so much more.
2. Optimise On-page SEO
All pages on your website should be search engine optimised to ensure they’re appearing for the relevant search terms and ranking well in Google. Factors like content quality, keyword optimisation, meta descriptions, title tags, headings, images, and page formatting can all significantly affect your on-page SEO.
A few good rules to follow when it comes to optimising your on-page SEO are:
Include your target keyword in your heading, meta description and title tag.
Ensure your content answers the users questions and provides value.
Always write image alt text.
Use clear formatting such as H1, H2, H3, bullet points, bite-sized paragraphs, and images to help break up text.
Keep your content focused to avoid tangents and irrelevant information.
Always include a relevant call to action.
3. Write Keyword Optimised and Value-rich Blog Posts
Blog posts increase your domain authority by providing value to users and positioning you as an expert in your field. The longer, more value-rich your blog articles are, the better they will perform in Google. According to research carried out by HubSpot, the ideal blog post length is between 2,100 to 2,400 words.
However, it’s not just the length of your blog posts that matter. After all, you could write 2,400 and not say much of anything at all. If you want your content to provide real value, it must be keyword optimised and written to meet the needs of your target audience. You can use tools like SEMRush to study your industry keywords and ensure your content is targeting the right searches and people.
To understand what your audience responds well to, you should analyse your Analytics data to see which articles they’ve engaged with most in the past. This can greatly inform your content strategy moving forward, ensuring your efforts are as productive as possible.
4. Optimise Your Website for Mobile
Did you know that mobile users generate over half (54.4%) of website traffic globally? With that many people browsing the internet from their mobile devices, it’s essential your website is optimised for mobile. If your website cannot be easily accessed, loaded, and explored via mobile, you could lose a significant amount of traffic and with that the potential to convert users into paying customers.
To optimise your website for mobile you want to focus on responsive design. What this means is that, no matter the size of the screen its displayed on, your website will fit the screen and present all information clearly. This allows mobile users, who are typically browsing from a small screen, to interact easily with your website.
Of course, there are many other factors to consider when optimising your website for mobile, including: custom CSS code, responsive themes and plugins, improving site load times, testing core Web vitals, redesigning pop-ups for mobile, and ensuring high image quality. But beginning with responsive design is a great place to start.
5. Gain High Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are one of the most important factors in helping improve your website’s ranking. Not only do high-quality backlinks increase your website's ability to succeed but they are also considered one of Google’s top ranking factors.
Backlinks are when one website links, via url, to a particular page on your website. This is to help direct users between websites where they will find information catered to what they are looking for. Gaining high quality backlinks to your site from high authority domains can have a significant impact on your site visibility, conversion rate, and overall success.
A few great ways to gain high quality backlinks include writing guest posts or creating white papers or reports (or other linkable assets) websites want to link to. If your website has a good, healthy backlink profile, you will soon see the benefits in terms of increased rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Final Words
There are hundreds and thousands of websites on the internet, all of which are competing for the top spot in Google search results. Although you can’t dramatically change your website’s SEO overnight, there are many improvements you can make that will produce long-lasting and impressive results. We hope this article will help you get started and yield positive results.