In 2018, your digital platforms are potentially the most cost effective ways to drive leads and sales, so building your business’s presence online should be a fundamental part of your marketing.
In this article, we are going to cover the 5 best ways to optimise your website in major search engines such as Google and Bing.
Follow these, and you’ll be hitting those search engine top spots in no time.
1. KEYWORD OPPORTUNITIES & TARGETING
The search terms you’d like to rank for in search engines may seem obvious, but how do you know whether your customers are actually searching them?
When deciding what keywords will work, you’ll need a tool such as the Adword Keyword Tool or KeywordTool. They show how many times each month a customer searches a keyword, whilst recommending alternative keywords. Identify keywords with healthy search volumes that relate to your products and services and at this point, keep them realistic and specific to your services. Traditionally, the higher the
search volume, the higher the competition.
2. FUNDAMENTAL SEO SIGNALS
The next step is to ensure that your website houses these keywords. You need to tell the search engines what each pages refers to, reflecting your keywords. If you offer ‘social media management’ services, you’ll need a page on your website about this. Ideally, you need a page for every target keyword, however you can group similar keywords on one page.
Once you have identified which keywords to optimise on each page, you can start to think about the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) signals for the search engines, such as Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and Headings. These should be consistent with the targeted key terms and most are easily adjusted in content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla.
3. BRAND MENTIONS – NAME, ADDRESS & PHONE NO.
When it comes to SEO, you may have heard of ‘link building’. This is associated with the authority of your website and contributes to the performance of your site in major search engines. They are essentially like votes from other businesses websites. Getting quality votes from other websites can be a tricky and expensive endeavor, however, there are some good ways to do this fairly cost effectively.
A NAP (Name, Address & Phone) reference is a form of link building that can help performance, especially locally. They are seen by Google and aligned with the name, address and phone number on your website. There’s some great automated tools available that will build these NAP references for you – check out Moz Local and Brightlocal.
4. BRAND BIDDING
We’ve talked about SEO and the simplest ways to improve your organic visibility. Second to this, there are the some easy ways of generating traffic via paid search such as Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Most businesses will rank for their business name by default due to a relevant domain name and history – but not always. Often, their suppliers or even their competition will bid to rank for a businesses name. If you search your businesses name on Google or Bing, you’ll be
able to see if anyone is bidding on it. If so, they may be pinching traffic or selling your product through their website which will cost you more down the line.
The easiest way to minimise this is to bid on your business name in Google Ads or Bing Ads. You should get a 10/10 quality score, meaning
minimal costs and automatically ranking in position one. It’s worth noting that you can stop others bidding on it if you have a registered trademark and secondly, if you bidding on your brand name, you may see a reduction in branded organic traffic.
5. RE-TARGETING EXISTING TRAFFIC
Our final point is around retargeting those who have previously visited your website. When a potential customer visits, you can set a ‘cookie’ within their browser specific to their interaction on your website. This gathers information you can use to create and tailor content to re-engage them across third party websites.
You may have seen this before where products follow you around websites encouraging you to return to the site and buy. For example, if
a customer adds a product to the shopping basket but never completes the purchase, you can track and encourage them to return by using tools like Google Ads and Facebook.
Usually, you can re-engage 5%+ of your audience this way, returning them and giving you another chance to sell your product or service and generate a sale or lead.
