10 SEO Tips Anyone Can Incorporate – Part 1

SEO is a process that has evolved greatly in the last few years. Thanks to Google’s constant updates, it’s become less and less about easy tips and tricks and more about what is really just best practice for your website, blog and business. In this post and our next one, we’ll share ten tips that can help you make the most of your current website. If they’re not practices you’ve been incorporating already, they could just give you the boost you need.

1. Informative, Interesting Well-Written Content

No matter how great a site design is and how beautiful the pictures are, you still need to express your basic messages and information clearly and concisely with good grammar and correct spellings. Take time to make your homepage message engaging. Keep your ‘about us’ information to things people will want or need to know and try to ensure the tone suits the personality and character of your business, as well as your target audience.

With some time and effort and getting a second set of eyes on board to spell-check, you’re probably capable of doing all this yourself. Who understands your business better than you?

But if you’re targeting other countries and people speaking other languages, make sure the translator you hire understands the importance of translating with the same tone or character you have put into the original site copy.

2. Use language That Your Target Audience is Familiar With

While you may be an expert in your field, don’t forget that those searching for services you offer using Google may not be. This is an important distinction to make in terms of who you’re targeting and the language you use. Using industry specific terms or technical terms could be the best language to use if you are going after customers who are also specialised in the area you’re dealing with. However, if your customers don’t speak the same industry-language as you, try to use the terms they would. It will help them and you when that’s what they type into Google.

3. Post Regularly

Keeping a site fresh usually means incorporating a blog or a news section and utilising some social elements too. Posting fresh content on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis ensures your site is providing extra value to your customers – something Google looks fondly on. It helps your site look relevant and current and can help you rank better, especially if your consistent with it. Some sites advise posting about three blog posts per week. This is quite a lot for small businesses and I would advise that quality will always beat quantity in the long run. Google emphasise the same themselves.

Posting up news, updates and information also feeds your social activity and engages new and current customers there. And finally, it helps you to increase keyword use, while keeping them varied and diverse and without over-using them.

4. Vary Content

If you are posting new content to a blog or news section regularly, try to vary what you’re posting. This helps your blog appeal to different individuals as well as making sure you don’t become bored or overwhelmed trying to provide and create lots of the same. Keep an eye out for relevant news stories that relate to your products, services or industry. Try to include photos, taken by your or your staff when possible for authenticity and for copyright reasons. Infographics can be another great way to share information and, like youtube videos, the creator will often have enabled them to be shared, meaning you can post them without worrying about copyright issues.

5. Testing Your Site

If you’re not getting as many sales as you would have expected but you are getting a lot of traffic, test the actual purchase process yourself to make sure it’s working fully. Websites can throw up little errors and issues and it’s good to frequently test out various parts of your website. Take time to check links and navigation all still work every so often and double check all images are loading fully.

If you are very familiar with your website, it’s a good idea to ask someone else to test it out too. WHile you may be used to how your site works and where everything is because you’ve known it for so long, a new visitor may have valuable feedback or questions about where things are, where they expected them to be, how hard or easy the site was to navigate, whether it offered them the payment options they preferred etc. Put a list of things together that you can fix yourself and speak to your web developer about any other areas that might need more complex work.

In our next post we’ll be explaining tips six to ten so make sure to keep an eye on or twitter account for further updates.

In the mean time, feel free to contact us regarding website translation and start expanding your online audience.