So you have built yourself a great website - it looks slick and your new logo looks fantastic… now you just need some people to find it! But, getting relevant traffic to your website is no easy feat. You need to consider how well your site is optimised for search engines, and start trying to unravel the beast that is Google Adwords. A great tool for researching just how well your site is performing is Hubspot’s Website Grader. It quickly and simply covers all the key areas to improve your website’s organic search performance. We’re fans of keeping things simple, so here are our top three tips for improving your website’s search performance and your website grade.
1) Start a blog – it’s the best way to not only engage with your customers and prospects by providing interesting and relevant content, but every page gives you the opportunity to rank for keywords, and particularly long tail keywords. Plus it makes it easy to build internal links and inbound links, which all add up to Googly-goodness.
2) Use your keywords in all the places that the Google crawlers are looking for them. Make sure that they’re in your Headings, Page Titles and URLs as well as the metadata. If you need help figuring out what keywords to use, Google Adwords has a comprehensive Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator, and it also helps to have a look in Google Analytics and see what keywords are currently being used by people who find you online. When you’re looking for keywords to use, have a think through what terms really matter to you, for example there’s no use trying to rank #1 for online marketing, it’s a much better use of your time and money to be more strategic and choose longtail keywords that are specific to your business, like “online marketing Sydney” or “online marketing plans”. Look for keywords that are high volume and low competition and write relevant content around those.
3) Don’t use too many images. We all love a good-looking website, but you need to balance style with function. Too many images mean that the site can be slow to load, and with the rise of mobile devices and tablets you really need to consider people who are viewing your site from different platforms. And if you do you images, make sure that they are ALT tagged. This ensures that Google can “read” your images. In the code it looks something like this ‘img src=”www.yoururl.com/image.jpg” alt=”Dentist”. When writing this text be specific and not overly creative, people will search for a “dentist” not a “smile technician”. So some simple tips you can start using today to improve organic traffic and drive some relevant visitors to your website. For more ideas try out Hubspot’s Website Grader or contact us for a coffee and a chat.
