Three Easy Steps You Can Take to Improve Your SEO and Grow Your Business Today
Search Engine Optimisation is still seen by some as a ‘dark art’ – obfuscated by ostentatious jargon, ambiguously vague tautologies, and bothersome buzzwords. Much like this opening sentence.
But in reality, even if you don’t know the first thing about SERPs, Keywords, or Analytics, you can do three simple things to improve your SEO score today and get your site higher in the Google rankings.
1. Optimise your URL
So, you’re setting up your website. Hopefully you’ve already considered the kind of terms that you want users to be able to find your site for – for the purpose of this example, let’s pretend that we’re a local florist called ‘Ivory Flower’, looking to establish our online presence.
We’ve already completed a brilliant web design (with thanks to MB Web), and now we’re ready to make www.ivoryflower.co.uk live.
We already know that we want to rank for ‘flowers online in east sussex’, so we need to make sure that this appears in one of our site’s URLs to give us the best possible chance. We decide to create a page detailing where our physical shop is, as well as where we grow our flowers:
www.ivoryflower.co.uk/flowers-online-east-sussex
It’s important to remember that you shouldn’t change a URL once it’s been created. Why? Basically because you’ll damage your SEO and will have to set up redirects to mitigate any previous links and such – it gets messy. So, it’s always a good idea to have an SEO strategy in place before your site goes live.
2. Optimise your <h1>
H1 (Heading 1) tags help Google and other search engines to work out what a page is about. Without it, it’s unclear to both search engines and users what your page is about. And those two are your entire demographic.
To change this tag, you’ll need to log into the CMS of your site – with management systems like WordPress this is really easy to do, and is typically just a case of changing the title of a page. If you’re not sure how to use your CMS, we have lots and lots of experience with a myriad of different systems – so feel free to give us a call to see about some training.
Okay, so we’ve got the URL ready, and we know what the keyword is, so we create the H1:
<h1>Buy Flowers Online in East Sussex</h1>
3. Optimise your body copy
After your H1, make sure that your body copy is slick and clear. Aim for around 300 words per page, and make sure that you mention your chosen keyword at least once:
Looking to buy flowers online in East Sussex and the surrounding area? Ivory Flower has bouquets for days and tonnes of flower power – browse our full selection online, or call us today.
Pad the above out a bit and you’re well one your way to rising the ranks for ‘flowers online in east sussex’.
Keep It Going
SEO is something that grows more when you put more time into it. You have to pay close attention to how all the keywords you’re tracking are performing, and prune keywords that are not required, or that negatively impact your score. Furthermore, you need to successfully optimise your site for every keyword you want to show up for, and ensure your content is still written in an intelligent and engaging way – and update this all the time.
We love helping small businesses and sole traders to get fantastic websites up and running, and we also love making sure that they do their job – optimising them so that they work for you, and not the other way around.
If anything we’ve covered in this blog post seems a bit intimidating or time consuming, or you simply want some help to market your site online and you’re in the Sussex area, then feel free to contact us today.