Five Quick Things to Improve your SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be a frustratingly slow process. It can take months (if not longer) to get your website ranking well for highly competitive search terms. However, once SEO starts working for your website it is very cost effective. This is especially true when compared with the costs of using Google AdWords or Bing Ads.
The good news is that there are some simple things you can do that can have a real impact on your website’s SEO position. Listed below are five quick ways to improve your SEO:
1. Make your website secure
Google announced a few months ago that all websites needed to be secure by July 2018. Google have now started warning people when a website is not secure. Most people will not take the risk of entering a website when they get a warning sign. This can result in a lot of lost business.
A non secure website is one that has the http preface instead of https. It means that the website does not have a SSL certificate. It also means that the website does not encrypt sensitive information (eg credit card details, email address etc). Because of this, sensitive information can be more easily hacked.
We are already finding issues with websites that are not secure with both Google AdWords and SEO. For Google AdWords we have noticed that campaigns are costing more and are not as efficient. For SEO, we are noticing the rankings of non secure websites are falling. Both of which are bad for your business.
If you have not already made your website secure you need to do it very soon to avoid these problems.
2. Make your website mobile friendly
The majority of searches on the internet are now performed on mobile phones. In fact, we have noticed in the last 12 months there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people searching the internet using their mobile phones. This is true even for businesses that traditionally only had people using desktops to search (eg businesses targetting older people).
For this reason if your website does not load quickly for mobile phones your website will drop in it’s SEO ranking position. This is because from July 2018, Google tests the speed of a website based on how quickly it loads onto a mobile phone. Prior to July 2018, the speed test was done using the desktop version of your website.
So if your website is not mobile friendly and does not load quickly onto a mobile phone you need to get this fixed quickly if you do not want your website to lose its SEO ranking.
3. Make changes to your website
The worst thing you can do for SEO is to think once you launch it you can then forget it. The best thing you can do is to make changes to the website. This can be done is a variety of ways. The ways include adding new pages, changing the wording of existing pages, adding more links and photos. By doing this Google has a reason to come back to your website time and time again. This gives your website more opportunity to achieve higher SEO rankings.
4. Create internal and external links
Having quality links (eg links from online directories that are relevant to your business) are a great way to boost your SEO (especially at the start of a SEO campaign). If you write an article for a high ranking website and get a link back to your website this is one of the best things you can do for your SEO.
External links can be hard to get for a lot of small business. If this is the case, then concentrating on internal linking within your own website will also have a positive impact on your SEO.
5. Use Alt tags for all your images
Alt tags are alternative text descriptions that are used to describe videos and images on a website. They are designed to help people who are visually impaired. Alt tags are great for SEO. This is because Google will use the descriptions to help rank you for SEO. A lot of websites don’t bother with alt tags so you quickly gain an advantage by using them well. To do this you need to think about the keywords you want to use to describe the images or videos.
Dynamic Websites specialise in small business web design. We are based in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and provide services throughout Australia. We understand what it takes to get a small business online at an affordable price and with the minimum of fuss. Along with designing websites for small business, tradies and NDIS service providers we provide online marketing services. Our online marketing for small business extends to Google Ads, Google My Business, Microsoft Advertising, search engine optimisation (SEO), content writing and, blog writing.
