So you’ve created a website for your business, but are you implementing these simple steps to access FREE marketing for your business by Google itself? That’s right, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is about to become your best friend.
From a sample of 18,000 e-commerce outlets, KISSMetrics reports that 30.5% of all traffic to these e-commerce stores came from organic searches performed on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and a variety of other search engines. That means that for many websites a third of visitors every year will come from organic searches. There are simple changes you can make today that will help you to appear more often in searches, resulting in more traffic to your site - let’s get started:
The Key to SEO is Content, this means creating a Blog
When a user makes a search enquiry, Google sends out its data ‘spiders’ to the extremities of the internet to find the website or webpage that best answers the question and suits the needs of the user. This means that the content on your website needs to prove to Google that you are the right match, this can be done by providing content that either benefits the user or is interesting to the user and having a website Google deems trustworthy.
And even better, the benefits of adding a blog to your website extend so much further than simply increasing the SEO for your site; it gives you a platform to provide value to your audience, to share your brand story and add a human layer to your business, introduce your team and share their expertise & it gives you the opportunity to boost your keyword coverage (more on this later) and has the potential to have your content shared by others. A systematic review of over 1 million pages by Moz and BuzzSumo revealed that “long form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content.”
Ensure you’re putting out what Google considers High-Quality Content
Keywords are your Friend
A blog is a perfect opportunity to both share content with your audience and also enhance your exposure and ranking on sets of unique keywords. The competition for most common phrases is now far too fierce for a small business to wedge its way into and there is little chance of ranking among the top 3 for these high traffic words. Therefore it’s smarter to invest your time in researching and incorporating niche, localised and unique phrases that are still identifiable and associable to your brand and industry.
“A link is like a vote for your site. If a well respected site links to your site, then this is a recommendation for your site.” - Moz.com
Know what the Algorithm wants from you
Google first created its algorithm to ensure the most relevant content possible was prioritised in search, to make sure the user finds what they were looking for. Since the early days, search marketers have been hacking their way to better SEO and Google now makes daily updates to what has now become an incredibly complex algorithm to stay on top of the hacks and continue to provide suitable results for users.
The three biggest updates have been the Panda algorithm, the Penguin Algorithm and the Hummingbird algorithm and this is what they mean for you:
Panda - This update is all about on-site quality and ensuring the content you release and how real-life users would rate the quality of your site. This means avoiding thin pages (pages that offer little to no value), duplicate content (meaning you should create original content rather than copying from other websites, even from other pages within your own site) and only indexing high quality for Google to find.
Penguin - This update is all about backlinks and ensuring that you aren’t creating unnatural backlinks to boost your ranking. This means not using low-quality self-made backlinks within your site to try and increase your number of backlinks and also working to increase the number of backlinks you have from large credible sites rather than small sites. (Although backlinks from small sites are still helpful to your SEO) This also takes into account the Anchor Tags sites use to backlink your content ie. “Green Goodness Co is so helpful” is the Anchor Tag for this Green Goodness Co is so helpful backlink.
Hummingbird - Hummingbird was a complete overhaul of the entire Google algorithm. This update is all about Google better understand the user’s query and how to provide the best results with the new way that people are searching ie. the changes in language between traditional typed searches and new voice command searches. This means that again Google is focused on getting us to produce high-quality content that answers our users questions, so if this is your focus and not feeding the right keywords into algorithms than you will do great.
Read more about the three Google Algorithm updates that shaped SEO today here.
Crash Course Complete: these are the five key areas that you can work on today to boost your business website’s ranking on Google. All of which comes back to creating good wholesome content that your audience wants to read and making your website as trustworthy as possible to search engines.
Image by Hello Hello Studio
Social Goodness is your business and marketing co-pilot and this is what we’re passionate about. If you need help with your social media and marketing, handball your troubles to us and let us take care of it for you. We’d love to hear from you!
This blog is proudly brought to you by Social Goodness, a Holistic Marketing Studio. We would love to work with you and co-create an unstoppable business. Click here to visit our website and book a time to explore the possibilities.
