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Yes, we know. Real search engine optimisation techniques take time. You’ll need a formidable content strategy and an ongoing technical, on-site and off-site strategy to see great results. To improve SEO, you need to put effort in. You should analyse your target keywords and judge the intent of the searcher. It’s a minefield.
But, for many of us, our time is a precious resource. So, with that in mind, we’ve created a list of five (relatively) quick SEO tricks that you can do today to help improve rankings for your landing pages.
5 quick and easy search engine optimisation tips…
SEO Tip #1. Internal Linking
At INBOUND 2018, one speaker claimed that the most important thing you can do to improve your SEO is add links on your landing pages to the other pages on your website. Simple, huh? Unbelievably so.
Providing a good internal link structure can help users and search engine crawlers navigate to all the great content on your site, and help to naturally funnel users towards your conversion pages.
What to watch out for: Make sure the links that you build are useful to users and not built solely for search engine crawlers. This should be at the heart of every website improvement - how can it help give my customers a good experience?
Extra credit for: Look at the product or service pages you have that are orphaned, or that have very few internal links. This is a good opportunity to think about improving the amount of related content around that service or product that isn't all conversion related or totally salesy. Think about your users top questions, or industry news or thought leadership you could add to the mix.
SEO Tip #2. Improve your content
Let’s try something: skim through all of the content on your website – does anything stand out? If your copy is woolly, poorly structured and instantly forgettable, chances are your search rankings aren’t going to set the world alight.
What to watch out for: Keyword stuffing and incomprehensible copy will do nothing to help your landing pages to appear on a Search Engine Results Page (aka SERP). Instead, you should try to streamline your content. Organise your copy into meaningful, keyword-rich segments or landing pages.
Extra credit for: Find out the questions that your customer-base are actually asking about your product and take the time to answer these in a clear and concise manner. The People Also Ask box at the foot of SERPs will give you a good indicator of this.
SEO Tip #3. Get the basics right
One of the most important things you should do for your brand is to make sure you've got a unique page title and meta description for every page you want to appear in the search results. These are core aspects within SEO as you can control your keyword targeting and how your brand appears in search results, as well as being a ranking factor. Start by mapping a target keyword to each URL and begin optimisation from there.
What to watch out for: If you're not using a platform that lets you see page title and meta description lengths, make sure you take into account the max length of each (Around 60 characters for a title and 150 for a meta description).
Extra credit for: Once you've got a list of your target keywords you'll be easily able to see which keywords you don't have represented on your website. Once you know your content gaps, you can begin a roadmap to help produce content for these terms. Our favourite CMS from Hubspot has lots of innovative features that will genuinely help to improve your SEO, and the topic clusters chart will help you visualise the missing content on your site.
Ask FINALLY to set you up with Hubspot
SEO Tip #4. Check Your Data Accuracy Online
Okay, so this may take some doing – but bear with us. The information displayed about your brand online is important when it comes to improving your SEO performance - particularly for local search. Name Address and Phone Number (NAP) auditing can help ensure you're giving a consistent message about your brand on the internet.
So, how do you start? First of all, go through the top local directory and maps listing sites and ensure you're in control of your listing. Places like Google Maps, Bing places, Apple Maps and Yelp are good places to start.
What to watch out for: There are some lower quality local directories that will try and charge you for editing or creating a business listing. There are so many free alternatives out there so don't worry about paying for a listing just yet.
Extra credit for: If you are interested in tracking the performance of the larger local listings such as Google maps you can create trackable campaign URLs to utilise as your website URL. You'll be able to see in analytics the amount of traffic that has clicked through from the listings.
SEO Tip #5. Take a mobile-first approach
There are no more excuses – it’s 2019 already, which means you HAVE to optimise your website for mobile devices.
Chances are that you already receive a certain amount of website traffic from mobile and this figure is only going to grow. Google understands this all too well so if your website isn’t responsive or optimised for mobile, your rankings will take a hit. If you’d like FINALLY to sort this out for you, we can – just speak to our web development team.
What to watch out for: Ensure that all of the content on your website is geared towards a mobile audience. Think short paragraphs and selecting images which will still work if they’re cropped. Savvy CMSs – such as the Hubspot one which we know and love – will even create a mobile view of your landing page before you publish it, helping you to sanity check it before it goes live.
Extra credit for: Site speed is a ranking factor in mobile search results so pay particular attention to your site load times. Images are often a major culprit here, so perform a site speed audit and make sure you've got a good process for optimising images to make them suitable for the web before you upload.
The good news is that, strictly speaking, you don’t need to do any of this yourself. Speak to our SEO team at FINALLY now and we’ll get the ball rolling for you.
