Let me show you how to get SEO right!

Search engine optimisation. SEO. It is one of those buzzwords in digital marketing that everyone knows they can’t live without. However, if you’re not skilled or experienced you’ll find SEO very challenging to get right. With this being said, we have found the formula to SEO right! Let us show you how to do SEO this.

Google’s algorithms have become stricter and stricter over the years. In years gone by there were a number of SEO techniques that were used, such as link farming. This was where a number of pages were set up that just contained pages upon pages of URLs, or low-quality content, that linked back to other sites. This has become known as a black Hat SEO technique that gets a website severely penalised as it doesn’t add any value for the user. In effect, it steals search engine rankings from other sites who do a lot of work trying to earn these rankings using White Hat SEO techniques.

First off, if you can afford it, hire an SEO expert. Or, better yet, become one with our SEO and Web Analytics Course – it will be worth it. However, if you are an entrepreneur or are someone who wants to learn how to get SEO right, then read on.

How do you get SEO right?

Step 1 

Research your keywords. Find out which words and phrases your clients use to search for your products or services. Google Keyword Planner is great if you have an active Google Ads account. Also, do some research on your competitors and what they seem to be doing better than you.

Step 2 

Plan and optimise your website so your clients can easily find what they are looking for on your pages. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly and not too slow as Google ranks pages according to a client’s experience. Most people will be accessing your site from mobile devices – which are either iOS or Android – so make sure that their experience of your website is top notch on mobile.

Remember to use long-tail keywords themes for your blog and FAQ page. The more common keywords are highly sought after. As such, they have lots of competition going after them. This means that you need to find phrases which people use to search for your company, in other words long-tail keywords, that you can use for your organisation. As these are more specific, not many other people will be competing for them. And as they are more specific to your company, they will provide you more qualified traffic to your site.

Step 3

Create excellent and regular content every month at least. And content isn’t only text – you can even post photographs with a tiny bit of text. The most important thing to remember here is to keep it relevant to your audience. Your social media channels also allow more people to potentially see your website, so keep it updated and relevant.

Step 4

Use tools such as Google Analytics to help you measure the success of your SEO. One of the key benefits of this analytics platform is that you can see how much traffic you’re getting on either a weekly or monthly basis. It divides the traffic up as follows:

• Direct
• Organic
• Referral
• Social

Under ‘organic traffic’ you can see what search terms people are using to get to your website. If the search terms are the same as those you are using in your SEO strategy then you know that your efforts are paying off.

Step 5

The bottom line of SEO is, the happier you make search engine users, the higher you will rank. So, write and optimise your website for humans, not search engines.

*Stay away from any company that promises you guaranteed rankings. They’re phonies! No one can guarantee certain ranking results – no matter how good they are or claim to be.  The higher you ultimately rank on search engines depends on how popular users find you.

Plan for SEO success

Learn more about the technical aspects or get a techie to do it for you

Digital marketing and SEO obviously have many technical elements, including indexing, schema, crawling, page speed, URL and site structure, etc. And if you don’t know what any of that means, don’t fret. You can always get someone who is more technically inclined to help you and who’s done an SEO and Web Analytics Course which proves that he or she knows what they’re talking about. The most important results of these technical aspects are:

• The performance of your website,
• Its visibility, and
• How search engines find your website.

Put a lot of effort into the on-page aspects

Your on-page aspects are the content that visitors to your website see including the text, videos, audio or images. With your text, make sure that it’s of an extremely high quality:

• Be very careful to run it through spellcheckers so that you pick up any typos.
• The search engines will penalise your site if it finds that you have duplicate content on your site so make incredible sure that everything on your site is original. There are many plagiarism checkers out there which will help you to audit your site.
• It’s also the content that only search engines see including structured data, ALT and HTML tags. It’s extremely important to insert ALT tags onto all of the images on your site. This is because search engines are not able to read images so if you don’t have a description of the pictures on your site, they will be passed over and you will have lost a golden opportunity to have your site rank even further.As we know, content is king in digital marketing so you can spend a lot of your energy in this area.

The off-page factors are crucial aspects too

The name is self-explanatory, but off-page factors are anything that is not on your website. Examples include link building, pay-per-click marketing, reviews, social media marketing, and user-generated content. Off-page factors aim to grow and demonstrate your website’s authority, relevance, and trust, as well as build your audience.

And there you have it, your three-step plan to SEO success. What steps do you follow to ensure your SEO’s success? We’d love to hear from you. Contact us today or comment below with your SEO success plan!

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Become an expert in SEO with the Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course. After completing this course, you will understand the finer points of SEO and will become a SEO expert who is in hot demand. If you are ready to learn about SEO and propel yourself in the fastest-growing career of the century, then this course is just for you! Visit our website to learn more about this and our other online digital marketing courses.