Featured Guest Blog by Robyn Kyberd, Digital Marketer and Business Consultant.

Has the idea of SEO got you all confused?

I can sense you nodding your head and secretly hoping there’s a way to make sense of it all without reading eleventy billion blogs about it.

The secret to getting your business found online using SEO is all to do with language, mathematics and (believe or not) a good dose of common sense.

Optimising your own website for search is actually really easy once you get a handle on the slightly technical side of things.

At the end of the day, you don’t really need to understand in depth how it works, you just need to know what works. And then do it. (Emphasis on the “do it” part!) 

Here are some easy ways you can optimise your website site for search:

1: Keywords

SEO starts with keywords, and popularity of those keywords (because optimising for a term that no-one is searching for won’t get you very far).

Having strategic use of keywords is a good place to start.

Keywords that are:

• slightly longer (aka long-tail keywords)
• more specific to your audience (talk their language, not yours)
• act on user intent (i.e. people looking for information “how to…”, people looking to buy “buy online/shop/in my area”)
• have search volume (people actually looking for this term)

Considering all of this to find your target keywords will ultimately attract more of the right people to your site.

2: On-page Optimisation

You can make a number of changes to your website pages that will optimise your website for search. These include:

• insert your keyword in the page title, sub-titles and within the content of your pages (especially the first paragraph)
• making the copy on the page easy to read (spacing and phrasing is very important)
• Include the page keyword into meta-descriptions and the URL of your page
• Linking to other pages within your site and adding links to quality external links within your page copy where appropriate
• insert keywords into the title, alt-tag and descriptions of any images on the page
• Editing the Google Snippet and Meta Title (If you use Yoast SEO for WordPress this is easy)

These on-page optimisations help tell Google what your page and website is all about, which in turn helps Google rank you for the right search terms.

3: Make use of Meta Titles and Descriptions

Your title and meta description are what’s shown in the search engine when someone types something related to your business. This is the first chance you’ll get to convince people to check out your website.

The meta title and description are like a mini advert for your website. You have a small window of time and limited characters to attract the searchers attention, so you make every character count.

Ensure to include your page’s target keyword in the meta title and description.

You can use the help of online tools like Yoast’s SEO plugin for WordPress to see how the final draft of your meta title and description will look on the search results page.

4: Improve Loading Time

An important part of website optimisation for search is your website’s loading speed.

A slow to load website is the most common reason why people leave a website. Visitors tend to disengage and leave the website if a page takes more than 3 seconds to display anything.

An easy way to improve loading times is to:

• Remove unnecessary plugins from your website
• Reduce image file sizes before uploading
• Reduce the amount of visual content / sliders / fancy animations happening on each page.

For the technically minded you can

• Minify CSS
• Activate a website cache
• Activate a security plugin to prevent spam bots

5: Optimise your website for mobile devices

If you are choosing to promote or conduct business online then mobile optimisation is a must.

To make your site mobile friendly:

• Keep your image file sizes small to reduce page load time
• Optimise the website layout so that the text, images and forms display properly and don’t run off the screen.
• Ensure the navigation allows visitors to easily find what they are looking for and/or contact you

Mobile responsiveness is important as a poor experience on your website will make them skip quickly over to your competitors. Google also ranks websites with a better mobile experience higher than those that do not.

6: Keep your location information consistent

When relying on your location (and Google’s ability to triangulate your location) as a way to bring you clients, your location must be the same across all directories, social platforms, and your website.

This means getting your business name, address, phone number and opening times consistent. There are online services to check this for you, or an easy way to do this is to routinely Google your business name and see what random listings may have out of date information.

You can also improve your local search optimisation by listing your business onto as many local, global and niche directories as you can.

7: Make your website secure

Google indexing now prioritises websites with an active SSL certificate and running over HTTPS (instead of HTTP).

I know this is geek talk but if you go to your website you can see in the browser if your website has a padlock next to your website URL, and if it says https://www….

The easiest way to activate SSL on your website is to contact your website hosting provider as most of them offer this as a service and can activate it for you.

For more tips about optimising your website for search read: 22 Factors That Contribute To Good SEO On Your Website.

Featured Guest Bio:

Robyn Kyberd is a digital marketer and business development consultant at Optimise and Grow Online, a haven for visionary entrepreneurs and small businesses who seek custom business and marketing strategies to suit their unique business and personality.

Known for her data-driven decision-making, Robyn has a talent for uncovering hidden insights and using them to build connections between your ideas and your customers in ways to amplify your business growth and momentum.

She is also incredibly good at identifying, fixing and automating all the I’m-not-thinking-about-that processes that are costing clients time, energy, and income.

Find her at optimiseandgrowonline.com.au, where you can find new ways to optimise and grow your business.