If you are looking to direct more traffic to your website, the easiest and most cost-effective thing to do is review your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts. Here are some startup tips that people use to get a kick start in SEO.
Identify your Audience
When looking to improve SEO, it is important to do some research about the target audience. Identify the audience you are looking to direct to the website and ensure that you have a good content strategy for them in place. By doing this research early on in the SEO process, it means that the traffic coming to the site will be of good quality and from the audience you want to attract.
The better you know your target audience and what they are looking at/what they want, the better the SEO efforts can be applied to your website, which will hopefully increasing the levels of traffic.
Use Free SEO Tools
Free online SEO tools are a great way of being able to monitor your SEO efforts. Making the most of these free tools can ensure that your SEO strategy can be monitored and continually improved.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you information surrounding user behaviour on your website. It is a necessary tool when understanding how users interact with your website, giving your ideas into how you can improve the quality of your content and give your users the best experience possible.
Google Analytics can help you to find things out like:
- What your major traffic sources are
- The most popular landing pages on your site
- The most popular exit pages on your site
- The most visited pages on your site
- The keywords that people used to find your site
Google Webmaster Tools
Google webmaster tool allows you to submit your site map. This is important because it is the best way to inform Google about your website. It will notify search engines when you update pages on your website so that they can crawl. Crawling the website means that the search engines can understand the content on the website and get in ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
“A site map is a model of a website’s content designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site”.
Find your Social Media Platform(s)
Social media is very important when starting to use SEO. Deciding on the right social media platform is key when posting content because you want to find the one that is the most appropriate for your business. It is always better to post quality content over quantity. So identify the best social platform(s) for your website and audience, and use them to promote your content through a solid content marketing strategy.
Create a Blog
Creating a blog is a great way to help increase your websites SEO because it will be of relevance and interest to your audience. If the posts are compelling and promoted well through your content marketing strategy, then they will draw links and social media activity that will boost brand awareness.
Write Easy-to-read Content
Making sure that your content includes the keywords is necessary because it means that it is better at ranking in Google. This content can be in any form like video, audio, images but when uploaded to the site for it to rank well it should always have text accompanying it so that you can get the keywords in.
Site speed is a ranking factor when it comes to ranking in the SERPs. Having a website where the content includes lots of images, videos and animations are bad for the site speed. This can often make the content have a negative impact on SEO or user experience.
Site Navigation
Making sure that you group certain content into categories is important because it can make sure that the navigation of the site is user-friendly. It allows your users to find the information they are looking for in less than three clicks. Finally, a good site navigation ensures you have friendly and meaningful URLs for the site content which again can help with SEO.
