With Google dominating the market share for all search engines in Australia at a staggering 94 per cent, it's not surprising many fledgling or successful entrepreneurs are wondering how their product or service can reach the dizzy heights at the top of Google search.
As one of Brisbane’s leading digital agencies, join us to discover five core ways to improve your SEO strategy to capture audiences and convert them to paying customers.
Become an On-Page SEO Pro
On-page SEO optimises your website’s content and structure to make it more visible to search engines.It’s a critical part of any good SEO strategy, and if you want your site to rank higher in search results, you need to ensure you’re doing it right.
Here are some ways to improve your on-page SEO.
Use Keyword-Rich Titles and Descriptions
Make sure your titles and descriptions include the keywords you want to rank for. This will help search engines understand your pages or posts and match them with relevant searches.
Optimise your website’s structure
Search engines crawl websites by following links. So, if your website’s structure is well designed, it will be easier for them to index your pages and understand your site’s content.
Use keyword-rich anchor text
When you link to other pages on your website, use keywords in the anchor text .This helps search engines understand the content of the linked-to pages and improves the crawler’s ability to find them.
Pages that contain more links to that page are also seen as “important” content for that website and are another SEO factor – among Google’s 200+ SEO factors.
Optimise your images
Include keywords in your image file names and alt text. This will help search engines index your images and display them in image search results.
Publish fresh content regularly
Search engines love fresh content. By regularly publishing new articles, blog posts, or other types of content, you’ll signal to the search engines that your site is active and worth indexing. There is a range of tools you can use to see how your site stacks up according to the experts, such as
Many experienced SEO experts like us here at Anchor understand and use relevant tools to guide content strategies and website growth.
Mobile-First Indexing
With a huge 63% of search traffic originating from mobile devices in 2019, according to dropshipping giants Oberlo, it’s crucial to include mobile optimisation in your SEO plan. Mobile-first indexing simply means that Google will index and rank your mobile content first. So it’s no surprise it’s made our list of five ways to improve your SEO strategies.
To make sure your site is ready for mobile-first indexing, you need to:
- Use a responsive design: Your website should be designed to adjust to any screen size.
- Optimise your images: Images are an essential part of any website, but they must be optimised for mobile devices. Make sure your images are the right size and format and compressed for faster loading times.
- Format your content: Most web searches are now done on mobile devices. When it comes to mobile-first indexing, content is king. Make sure your most important content is accessible on all devices and is easy to read.
- Use structured data: Structured data helps search engines understand the content on your website. Schema markup can help your website show up in rich snippets and knowledge graphs, improving your click-through rates. Schema markup is a form of data that, when added to a webpage, creates a description referred to as a ‘rich snippet’ in search results.
- Monitor your site’s performance with Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a free tool that allows you to monitor your website’s performance in Google search results. You can use it to see how your site is doing with mobile-first indexing, submit your sitemap for indexing and importantly, see what search terms you are ranking for. Along with which of your pages and posts are attracting the most attention.
Metadata
Concentrating on metadata can help build a robust SEO strategy because
- It can help you get more clicks from the SERP snippet: Your metadata includes your title tag and meta description, which are displayed in the search results. If you optimise these elements for click-throughs, you can increase the number of people who click through to your site from the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which is the list of results that a search engine returns in response to a user's query.
- It can improve your click-through rate from the search results: Your title tag and meta description show up in the search results, so it’s essential to make sure they’re both optimised for CTR (Click-Through Rate). This is the number of “clicks” by visitors through to your website. CTR can also refer to clicks on adverts and other links.
Provide the Best Possible User Experience
In the past, overly concentrating on keyword stuffing or shady backlinking was thought to be the best route to your millions. However, focusing on your site’s usability is critical with search engines like Google shifting towards human experiences and behaviour.According to SEO Guru Neil Patel, simply adding a particular number of keywords in the text body of a blog or web copy makes reading somewhat difficult for the user. With new Google updates such as Hummingbird back in 2013, keywords are becoming less and less relevant – and subsequent updates help “search intent” to become more relevant.
Google’s search is now so sophisticated that it uses specific intelligence that understands what your potential customers mean when typing into a search bar. This can offer your page to a reader that may not even contain many keywords. However, it’s worth understanding that keyword placement in meta tags, descriptions, URLs and page titles is, of course, still crucial, as we outlined above.
Partly so that Google can understand the important aspects of your content. So when building the best SEO strategies, successful entrepreneurs will combine user experience with other techniques to get that elusive high-ranking website. A well-designed website has the customer journey at its core. This will improve visitor engagement, which then increases organic traffic and ultimately leads to more sales.
Have a Link-Worthy Site
If you want people to link to your site, you need to have content worth linking to. Creating high-quality content that’s informative and interesting is a great start. However, you must also make it attractive for people to link to. That means using descriptive and concise text that answers the question with authority.
Building relationships with other websites help link building
One of the best ways to get links is to build relationships with other website owners. When you have a good relationship with others in your industry, they’re more likely to link to your site if they think it’s relevant and beneficial for their readers. This isn’t about asking for backlinks or buying backlinks. It’s more about conducting outreach work in your industry.
Here are a few ways you can build relationships with other website owners
- Comment on their blog posts
- Connect with them on social media
- Email them to let them know about your latest post or piece of content
To Summarise
If you want to improve your SEO strategy but are not sure where to start, get in touch with our expert SEO team.With our proven track record, we can help create both on and off-page Search Engine Optimisation plans and ensure your target customer reaches you first. For more help, head to Basic SEO Checklist: Guide to Search Engine Optimisation.
