You’ve spent a lot of money and time to build an awesome website. Now, you just have to wait for people to visit it and learn more about your business, right? Well, not quite. If you think that your job is done, think twice. Truth be told, who cares that your website is great if no one sees it?
This is where SEO takes centre stage!
If you want people to discover your website and business, search engine optimization is necessary. This blanket term basically includes all processes you need to use to boost your site’s chances of ranking well in search engines like Google. SEO is truly what makes the difference between making it easy for your target customers to find you and having your website forgotten in a sea of sites. Considering that 75% of Internet users don’t even look past the first page of their search results, you have a difficult job.
But, don’t worry! This article will help you explore five simple but powerful SEO tips that can help you boost your website’s traffic.
1. Remove Anything That Slows Down Your Site
These days, everything that happens digitally needs to move fast. Consumers live in a fast-paced world, and they are less accepting of things that take too much of their time. Websites that load slowly are no exception to the rule.
If a decade ago, you could get away with a slow-loading website, today, that’s no longer an option. Think about it: there’s no good experience coming from having to wait for several minutes until a website page loads properly to find what you need. Why would you think that your target customers think otherwise? So one critical factor in SEO today is having excellent page load speed.
If you’re not convinced that you should do something about how fast your website moves, know that even a one-second delay in page load time can bring a 7% loss in conversions. You simply shouldn’t be ok with that.
But, how do you fix a slow loading website? Here are a few recommendations:
- Get rid of all non-essential elements that slow down your website. For example, if you own a WordPress website, you could deactivate the plugins you don’t need.
- Declutter your sidebar and only include actually essential widgets.
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests.
- Clean up your media library.
- Cache your web pages.
- Optimise the image you use (resize them, include captions, add image structured data, optimise the image title).
Note that some SEO practises for improving page load speed can get pretty technical and complex. So, if you are not a tech-savvy person yourself, it’s best to work with a seo agency London for help rather than “break” something about your website.
2. Use Links From Other Websites With Relevant Content
Forget about the wrong belief that linking to relevant and authoritative content pages will make people leave your page. That’s not really how it works, and that’s not how you should think when using SEO to boost your traffic.
Link building is actually still a key part of SEO. Including linking to tons of high-quality sites and sources, including your industry rivals, can help both your reader and you.
Think about it: you can’t expect to get if you’re not willing to give. For example, linking to other authoritative sites can also help you get your content linked from theirs in the future.
Remember that link building is more about quality than quantity. So, it helps your website to have a few authoritative links to quality content rather than dozens of poor quality links.
3. Pick Relevant Keywords
Targeted keywords are another crucial area of SEO that you should never ignore. If you’re not sure just how important keywords are, remember that they are literally the main words that lead Internet users to your site.
To properly use keywords in your SEO strategy to improve your website’s traffic, you need to know how to extract the relevant ones. More precisely, take all your website’s content, from images to articles, videos, and so on, and summarise all of them in SEO-friendly terms.
What do SEO-friendly terms mean? For your keywords to be SEO-friendly, they should be in line with what people really search for when looking for a product/service like yours. Simply put, the right keywords, besides being industry related, must also suit the terms familiar to users.
There are a lot of tools you can use for keyword research, including Google’s Keyword Planner tool.
4. Create Content for Humans, Not for Search Engines
While keywords are essential for SEO purposes, they should never surpass the real qualities of engaging and valuable content. Don’t just stuff your content with keywords if the quality of the content is affected.
Today’s search engine algorithms got a lot smarter and can truly differentiate between poor and quality content. Since search engines’ primary purpose is to help users, they will always better rank quality content than websites that stuff their blogs with keywords but make no sense to users.
Another essential quality of good content is related to responding to search intent. More precisely, say, for example, that a user is looking for advice on how to cook a certain dish. In this case, content that meets the search intent is the one that genuinely answers the user’s question and offers advice on how to cook that dish.
As the digital experts from Passion Digital explain, “When writing content for your website, prioritise writing for your target audience and optimise the content with keywords and other SEO practises afterwards. This will help you put your readers first and actually help them.”
5. Write Catchy Page Titles and Headlines
Quality content is great for SEO. Yet, you also need one more thing to help your content reach its true potential: attractive headlines and page titles.
Headlines and page titles are really what first convinces Internet users to click on your link and engage with your content.
Here are some tips on writing SEO-friendly headlines:
- Include keywords;
- Include numbers;
- Use the “How to” format;
- Use strong words (e.g., powerful, practical, valuable, mind-blowing, etc.);
- Keep headlines short (about 8 words).
