SEO Quick Wins
With SEO regarded as a ‘dark art’ by so many, a list of tips and tricks to get you going is well overdue. There is every chance that you are already doing some of these without even realising your actions are acyually affecting your SEO! So, without further ado, let’s dive in to the Top 5 SEO quick wins for your site.
Site Speed - Slow is No Go!
A slow site is….. a massive turn off! We used to just want things to be instant, now we expect them to be! Put yourself in your visitors shoes and recall a time you have landed on a website and it hasn’t loaded quickly. What happens? You click the back button and navigate elsewhere! Statistics show that if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% will abandon with 80% likely never to return. Wow! That’s a lot of visitors that will never get to experience the all singing all dancing site that is marketing your products and services. All is NOT lost! It's time for a spring clean........declutter your site by removing all the non-essential website elements. It is so tempting in WordPress to add plugin after plugin in the hope of reaching the promised land, but are they adding value? I bet you have plugins that you don’t really need? Deactivate them now! I also recommend checking your host provider. Use a host located in the same country as you. Do they offer 99.9% up time? Lets say your host is based in the United States, essentially you are sending a request all the way to the US and then waiting for the resonse to be sent all the way back to the UK. These two elements play a huge part in the speed of your website. There are many other great fixes but our final suggestion is based around image compression. Size matters people! Try popping your website URL through this tool to see what speed you are currently running at and what fixes are required. If this doesn’t mean much to you, speak to a professional!
Write for Humans - not Google!!
For the purpose of your website content, you need to keep it real by writing for humans and not search engine robots!. ‘But how’ we hear you cry!
Measure The Results
Install Google Analytics and this can then underpin everything you do within your website. Adding the code is easy and you can find out how to, here. Once instyalled you can find out all sorts of fascinating activities that happen on your site when you aren't watching......that is if you are that way inclined. Information such as how many visitors your website has, where they have come from, if they are new or returning, if they used an iPhone or Android through the Vodafone network whilst in their underpants! OK so I got a bit carried away the last point isn’t exactly true, but you get the idea. The important thing about Analytics is that you take the time out to understand it and that every piece of digital marketing you carry out is measured – otherwise, what’s the point in investing in marketing if you aren’t aware of the results? You could just be wasting your time and time is money!
Meta Data
Don't panic, stop slouching, it's all good! I know it sounds technical and it is to a degree but all a meta description refers to is the bit of text underneath the title and URL found on the search results pages of Google. So first off we have the title. The meta title needs to describe the page and that is key to it's effctiveness. A bit like the title of a book in a library, if the book is about Cats and you call it "Cute Dogs" the readership levels aren't going to be fantastic now are they?. The landing page is teh place for you to promote your main product or service. On the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) underneath the title you will see up to 140 characters of text, this is known as the meta description. These descriptions don’t affect SEO in terms of the keywords you use, however they bear a huge impact on click through rate. Think of it as the blurb on the back of the book! If people are clicking on your title and spending time on your website then this WILL affect SEO, positively. So what’s the best way to write a meta description? Just the same as content, try not to overthink it. At the absolute most you have 140 chargcters to play with and within this you want to include a call to action. This can be anything like ‘Visit our website now’, ‘Request a free quote’, ‘Don’t delay’ or ‘Book online’. ‘Free delivery’, ‘10% off for June’, ‘Buy one get one free’ etc. This is the place to be shouting about special offers. Get this information in and you should find an increase in website visitors.
