Many people will use a digital marketing agency to increase their visibility online which will usually mean better results. However, if you are a startup or SME lacking budget, there are some things you can do yourself to achieve better rankings.
Your rankings will not magically improve overnight, but by following these tips you could see a difference within a few months. The main thing to note is that it is a constantly evolving process, so you need to make time to do these activities on a regular basis, such as adding new content a few times a week. Also, make full use of social media to drive people to your site and to engage with your web visitors.
The SEO basics for improving rankings on Google
Check your web site page load speed. Reduce the size of any large images. Check all links work correctly. Google Analytics will tell you your site speed and there are lots of tools like SEM Rush which will show you if your site speed is causing issues.
Try and ensure your company name is on every page of your site (even better if what you do is in your website URL).
Make sure all your images are optimised i.e. that they have alt tags which describe what the image portrays and ideally contains the the keyword naturally.
Make sure each page has a title that reflects the content and a meta description that has your keyword in it.
If you have a Wordpress site, use the Yoast plugin to help you work out how well your pages are optimised with the keywords you are hoping to rank for.
Your web pages should have c 300-500 words of content generally speaking as best practice. Many sites have too little content, which is not great where Google is concerned, so see where you can add content to existing pages. Write content for optimum user experience that answers your web visitors questions, linking to other relevant content.
Make sure you have links with relevant anchor text pointing to a different page on your site. The anchor text should accurately reflect the content of the page you are pointing to and ideally contain the keyword. It can be a good idea to have an FAQs section with the answers to the main questions containing links to other pages within the site.
Content and frequency of publishing
Have a think about all the words/phrases people would use to search for your kind of service/product and ensure you use these throughout your site. Use a tool such as SEM Rush to research and keep track of keywords. If you have Google Analytics installed, take a look at the keywords most often used which bring visitors to your site currently and use them more often.
Refresh your content often. Add a blog page to your site and keep the content up-to-date with relevant links to other pages on your site. Keep the home page updated with new text every so often – it can just be updating the keywords / adding an extra line. You could also display your tweets as a feed on your homepage that way something new is on your site all the time.
Make sure you have commercial pages i.e. service or product pages that are each written for one unique 'commercial intent' keyword that you want to rank for i.e. energy accounting software.
Set up a juicy page of content – this doesn’t sit on the main navigation but is linked to from your homepage and other pages within your site – this page should have 500 words or more, images and your main keyword a few times in the text. Ideally with no more than one link out of the page.
Don’t keyword stuff your text i.e. 10 times in one paragraph with little text in between.
Backlinks
Try and get as many highly relevant and good quality backlinks i.e. links from other sites to yours. Ideal if it’s a site that has lots of traffic (the BBC news site would be the holy grail for most people) – the sites must have good authority i.e. no dodgy sites, the higher the quality and relevancy, the higher you will appear in Google’s search results. Use tools like Moz to check domain authority).
Start with asking all the companies/brands/clients/local directories etc you work with to link to your page.
Make sure all your links to other pages work. Don’t have tons of links on your homepage as this gets perceived as being unnatural.
Social media provides great backlinks so this is a good reason to be using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others as appropriate. Find out what works well on one medium e.g. Facebook and then use the likes you get on that to invite people over to your twitter/website etc.
Make sure your site has a sitemap.xml – this helps search engines know about your site and what pages you have on it.
Make sure you have a listing on Google Places.
Youtube is fab for SEO (2nd most visited site in the world) so if you can get a video of yourself on Youtube and a link in the description back to your site this should positively impact your SEO.
Try and get listings in online directories e.g.Yell etc – just make sure your details are all exactly the same i.e. no different spellings / different address details etc.
How to check if your rankings have improved on Google
You can add your keywords to a tool such as SEM Rush to a keyword list and see the position each of your pages ranks at. Check back regularly to see how your rankings change over time. Note position 1-11 is generally page one on Google.
Can we help with your SEO?
If this all sounds like too much extra work, get in touch and to see if we can help. We can create your content strategy, write your content and manage your SEO. We can work on a one-off project basis or on a monthly retainer for SEO and other digital marketing activity.
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