Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can sound intimidating, but you don’t need to know how to code to improve your Google ranking. Strong SEO means that when someone does an online search relevant to you (and your business) you’ll appear higher up in the results on search engines like Google. Appearing at the top of the search results means more traffic to your site, and allows your customers to find you easily.
Follow our tips to improve your SEO today:
Make sure your website is optimized for desktop and mobile. We always recommend using WordPress to build your website because it’s easy to choose themes that are mobile optimized. Not only is it a better experience for your users, but Google will rank mobile optimized sites higher when someone is searching on a smartphone – and how often do we quickly Google things on our phones! When choosing a theme, look for words like “mobile optimized”, “reponsive”, or “dynamic”.
Link to your website. Google uses an algorithm to decide what comes up first in search results, that takes many things into consideration. One of those things is how many links there are to your content (including your own internal links!). Link to your content on social media, link to your websites from any other websites you may own, and link new blog posts back to relevant blog posts you wrote in the past.
Use keywords. That is, use the words that people would search to find you in your website content. For example, a strong keyword for this post would be “SEO”, so we’ll make sure to have “SEO” in the title, in the first paragraph of this post, in the URL, and listed as a keyword on our blog.
We use and recommend a free WordPress Plugin Yoast SEO because it makes this process easy. After you install the plugin, you will be able to set a focus keyword for your post, and Yoast will analyze your content and make recommendations for how you can improve your SEO score.
Fill in the alternative text for images. When a search engine “scans” your webpage for keywords, they can only understand text. They can’t see that a photo is relevant to a search, so you have to tell them! When adding an image to your post, fill in the Alt Text section with a few keywords related to your post. This will not be visible to your readers, but it will be picked up when Google is deciding how high to rank your page.
Small changes can make a big difference in how easy your business is to find online. Solid SEO practices are an investment that you can begin today.
Kindly note: We don’t like to refer to ourselves as “experts”, but we do take great pride in sharing our business advice, distilled down from our extensive research and (often) mind-blowingly frustrating experiences we’ve endured and learned from. We try our best to create a clear and humble approach to good business tactics that you and your teams can understand and turn into effective and productive revenue streams. We are actual, real people and look forward to supporting you in any way we can, whether it’s on the topic of this post, or other business development and marketing communications you may be involved in, or considering. We are proud of the services we provide; if you don’t see what you’re looking for, just ask us – we also take pride in being super responsive!