Top tips for supercharging your SEO in 2019.

Many people believe that once websites are built, they will have the “field of dreams” effect. I.e. if you build it, they will come. This is very rarely the case unless you take some steps to make sure your website is optimised for search engines.

Here are some of the factors you should be looking at to make sure people can find your website when they are searching for the products or services you provide.

Page titles
Page titles let the user and search engine know what the page is about. You see them as the blue links in the search results page and in your browser when you hover over a tab. They should be keyword rich and based on the search terms people will use. The optimal format is:
Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Business Name
The exception to this is your home page, which should have your business name at the beginning.

Meta descriptions
Strictly speaking, meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, however, they are important if you want to get users to click onto your website from the search results page. Your description should tell the user what they should expect from the content on the page and entice them into clicking your link.

ALT tags
Search engine bots and some users of the internet cannot see images. ALT tags are used to provide an alternative description to the search engine to help it understand the content. Use keyword rich descriptions in your ALT tags to help with your website’s overall visibility.

Links
User and search engine bots use links to navigate around the internet. Internal and external links are important to help your SEO efforts. Links internally need to link to other relevant pages, for example, if you talk about one of your products or services within a blog post, link to that using anchor text. Backlinks or follow links for other websites need to be from trusted, authoritative and relevant websites to help increase your rankings.

Website speed
How long do you wait for a website to load before you abandon and go elsewhere? According to research from Google, the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is about 15 seconds; but 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This means if your page doesn’t load within 3 seconds, half of your visitors leave your site before they see what you can offer. Imagine if you had 50% more opportunities to convert your visitors into customers? Google also uses site speed as a ranking factor in the mobile index.

Structured data
Schema markup allows you to give the search engine extra information about the content on the page. The easier you make it for a search engine to understand your website content the more accurately it can index and rank your website pages. Meaning better search results for the user and happy people all around. Some of the common uses of schema markup are for reviews or prices being shown in the organic results. This can also entice clicks from people interested in the products and services you offer.

Content
Last, but by no means least, content is not just king, it is the whole pack of cards. If you see any of Google’s consumer advertising, you will see that they like to be seen as the answer provider. You ask Google a question (Googling is even in the dictionary), but it isn’t Google that provides the answer, it is the trillion web pages across the internet. If your website answers the questions Google needs the answers to, and follows the above advice, you will get visibility and traffic. Wondering what questions you should answer within your content? It’s the questions your customers ask before they get to you. They will be researching online and if you can reach them then, you will have the best opportunity to convert them. Great content will be linked to and this helps in gaining visibility online. Make sure your content is genuinely useful to people and not a sales pitch.

Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss any of this further or to learn how we can help with your Google rankings.