These days having a website for your business isn’t just necessary – it’s the difference between failing and succeeding. If you neglect your online presence you will not only lose out on attracting new customers to your offerings, but you will also lose out on very important revenue which could come from acquiring new visitors – which in turn convert to real-life, buying customers.
But having a shiny new site designed and set-up is only half the battle.
If your website cant be found in Google, Bing, or Yahoo! then you really are not firing on all cylinders.
To amp up sales and win over more new customers you must rank well in the search engines. For most businesses they want to hit #1 spot in Google for their chosen keyword(s) and/or terms.
So, for instance if you have a car sales business and you operate in, say, Dublin – you would ideally want to rank high (i.e. in spots 1-5) for such terms as ‘car sales ireland’ or ‘secondhand cars Dublin’ etc…
That’s where SEO comes in. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is the process of modifying and tweaking your website’s settings so that you have a better chance of ranking above your competitors in the SERPs (mainly Google).
How do I improve SEO for my site? You may ask. Well here are some quick tips to help bump you up in the result pages.
The first thing you would need to do is speed up your website’s loading speeds. If it’s over 3 seconds you really need to look into having it reduced. Try out this tool to test your site: https://gtmetrix.com/
Input your site’s address and watch the tool go to work. It will show you page scores, page size, page load time as well as lots of other valuable information which you can then use to apply to your site to speed it up.
The next thing you will have to do is make sure all your on-page information is correct and targeting your chosen KWs. For instance, if we use the example above for car sales, we would need those terms in the title of the page, the description and maybe in the meta-tag area. This will laser focus those terms on the page and help you jump ahead in rankings.
Images are a big thing these days. Make sure the alt tags are filled in for those hard of vision. It really helps!
Another big factor is OFF page SEO. This is where you acquire back links which point to your site from LEGITIMATE sources. Never purchase or ask for backlinks to your site as you easily get penalized. Also, some vendors use really bad links to give your site an instant boost, but in the long term you will be blacklisted for these sort of practices. Stay well away!
A better solution would be to reach out to others in your sector and write informative and interesting articles for them to place on their site – this is known as Guest Blogging or Posting. I can be hard to find sources at times, but one of these links are much better than 1,000 bad ones.
This was just a quick summary on how you can improve upon the big aspects of your website. There are many more tips on the way, so stay tuned!
One last piece of advice: If you’re looking for an SEO Ireland expert, maybe you can Google it. Whoever shows up in first place is obviously doing something right! Think about that one... :)
Comments