SEO for beginners

By by Shoga Admin Posted on 5th December 2016

SEO is very important to increase traffic to any fledgling website. You can have an amazing new website, but, if it’s not bringing new business or brand awareness through search rankings then you need address this.

There are things that you can do yourself immediately before you employ the service of an SEO specialist. These will help you rank on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Site audit

A site audit can easily help with addressing the primary issues as to why your website isn’t ranking or where your website is ranking. This will then tell you how to optimise your site for better results.

There are several things to consider, such as your url, site structure, title tags, keywords and inbound links.

There are plenty of free tools and site checkers out there to use along with this you can use a checklist to understand your rankings and where to make changes.

Internal and External Linking

Receiving and generating links from other websites tells Google and search engines that your site is well maintained and regarded as having good standard of content.

This can be more difficult to do yourself as it can require the services of a PR company. If you’re able to write blogs on a regular basis then this is a start.  You can use your blog to reference external links. There are lots of tool out there to check your incoming and outgoing links. I like to use Moz and you can get a free trial for 30 days to see how you get on with it. You can also link your google analytics account to it and compare yourself to your main competitors.

Social media and Youtube

Search engines like content that is shared.  Social media accounts and video can show them that you have a trustworthy site. We suggest to all our clients that they set up social media accounts linked from their websites. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as a bare minimum. I’d also suggest they set up Google+, YouTube and Pinterest accounts.

The effect that regular social media has on SEO can’t be underestimated and it’s also a great way of sharing valuable and meaningful content.

Responsive

Have a responsive website is a no brainer.  By 2017 50% of digital consumers will use a smartphone to complete a purchase. These people will also seek out and find businesses in their area. If you’re site isn’t responsive and doesn’t perform well on a mobile then your website and and your rankings will be affected. You can use this site to check if your website is mobile and tablet friendly and if not I’m sure we can help.

Local search

Getting your business address listed with Google, Bing and Yahoo is great for targeting local leads. From here you can get your address out there and begin to get in the rankings for people searching for local businesses. Once you have been verified with these search engines you can distribute your address to host of business directories or you can employ someone to do it on your behalf.

There are loads of free tools out there to help you achieve your goals locally or nationally.  If you need any further assistance, we can also help.