9 Tips To Search Engine Optimise Your Content In 2021
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimisation.’ This is the process of increasing your website traffic through search engine results.
SEO helps your website become more discoverable. When potential customers search terms related to your brand, they’ll have a better chance of discovering your website and becoming a customer.
Learning how to optimise your website for SEO and conversions is crucial for your site’s success and ensuring it attracts the traffic that it should. What is the point in creating a fancy website if you don’t attract users and, in turn, create more opportunities to convert potential customers?
When you ‘optimise’ your content, you’re making your website more visible to people who are entering keywords associated with your product or service via search engines such as Google.
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How Does Search Engine Optimising Your Content Help Your Strategy?
Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant authority to answer your customers’ questions. Blog posts that specifically use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and get potential customers to visit your site.
To put the importance of ranking highly for SEO in figures; the first result on any given results page gets an average of 20.5% of the clicks. From there, the second result gets 13.32%, and the third gets 13.14%.
5 Reasons You Need To Optimise Your Website Content
1. An optimised website earns more traffic
The goal of SEO is to improve your website’s rankings in the search results. However, the purpose of achieving high rankings is to ultimately attract more traffic and ideally convert this traffic into customers and leads.
2. Strengthen your brand
Although branding is often considered a more traditional marketing strategy, while SEO falls into the digital category, the two involve similar steps. If your website is showing up for numerous search results this helps to build authority and credibility as a thought leader in your sector.
3. SEO doesn’t require you to pay for ad space
One of the key advantages of SEO is that it doesn’t involve the expense of paying for advertising. The first three search results are typically ads, however, the ‘organic’ ranking is just below these, and free. It is also a fact that over half (53%) of traffic comes from organic search – meaning more traffic for less money.
4. Stay ahead of your competitors
As you optimise your content, you’re not just working to improve where your site is ranking on results pages, you are also moving above – and getting ahead of – your competitors.
5. Help your target audience find your site
SEO can help your business get in front of your target audience as they actively search for information. Considering how common it is for consumers to use search engines to source information about products and services, this is a great opportunity to get recognised.
In fact, 62% of consumers turn to search engines first when they want to learn more about a new business, product, or service, while 41% use them when they’re ready to buy.
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How To Search Engine Optimise Your Content In 9 Simple Steps
1. Conduct thorough keyword research
Keyword research is critical, this is the method of researching popular words and terms that users will search for in search engines to answer their queries.
This method helps to attract targeted audiences to your website via search engines like Google. It is most important to choose relevant keywords for your business in order to reach the relevant people when they go online looking for information on products or services you have to offer. There are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: URLs, title tags, headers, and body and meta descriptions.
3. Produce long and valuable content
According to Buffer, the ideal length of a blog post is 1,600 words.
Before you decide on the length of your content, Google your primary keyword and check the top ten result in the SERPs (search engine results page). Are some of those pages longer than 1,600 words? Then your content should be a similar length too.
This sends a signal to Google that you are providing more information. If a lot of people spend a long time on that page and read to the very end, you are more likely to rank higher.
3. Optimise for on-page SEO
On-page SEO tells you how to optimise your website as you build specific pages. Factors such as headlines, sub-headlines, URL slugs, meta titles and descriptions fall under this category.
Use your primary keyword in your headline, slug and sub-headlines such as H2 and H3 to achieve increased authority.
Insert your primary keywords and related keywords throughout your body copy and image alt text. Include plenty of context for Google to accurately understand your content.
A meta description is an additional text that appears in SERPs that lets readers know what the link is about – it is essentially your sales elevator pitch to entice readers to visit your page. The meta description gives searchers information they need to determine whether or not your content is what they’re looking for and, ultimately, helps them decide if they’ll click or not.
The maximum length of the meta description is 300 characters.
4. Use media and alt tags
Blog posts should not only contain text – they should also include images that help explain and support your content visually while breaking up the text.
Search engines cannot ‘see’ images, they simply look for images with image alt text, this is essentially the image title. To ensure that your images benefit your website blog’ SEO, you’ll need to ensure you include image alt text.
This ultimately helps those images rank in the search engine’s images results’ page by making your keywords discoverable through images too. In the Google User Experience update coming into effect this month, pages with rich media and video content will be rewarded over those without.
5. Optimise for off-page SEO
Off-site SEO refers to the ways in which you optimise your website via external methods. Guest blogging, social media activity, brand mentions and more can all improve your SEO strategy as well as being channels to distribute and promote your content.
6. Make sure your blog is mobile-friendly (or has a responsive design)
With the majority of people accessing websites via mobile devices (96% in the UK), it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly design as Google displays the mobile-friendly results first.
Furthermore, Google has launched the mobile-first index which means you might rank better if you focus on mobile-friendliness.
7. Link internally and externally where possible
Inbound links to your content show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same applies to linking internally to other pages on your website. Linking internally keeps users on your website and resurfaces your other relevant and website pages to search engines.
8. Continually create and publish evergreen content
When planning and writing your blog posts, ensure it is evergreen content. This type of content is about topics that will remain relevant and valuable over a long period of time, with only minor changes or updates. Evergreen content is important for:
- Helping you rank over a long period of time, not just the near future.
- Contributing to steady streams of traffic coming to your blog and website long after it has been published.
- Helping you attract leads over time as a result of the traffic that is continually generated.
9. Update your current content and remove outdated content
To improve your SEO, you do not need to continually create new blog content. Although it is recommended to create new content – you should also focus time and resources on repurposing and updating your existing blog content.
This is because it takes a lot longer for a completely new piece of content to rank on the search engine results page and gain authority. However, an updated piece of content will reap the benefits almost immediately in comparison.
Not only will your updated content rank faster and improve your number of visitors, it will also take a lot less time and fewer resources to update as opposed to creating a brand new blog post.
Additionally, updating and repurposing some of your most successful pieces of content extends its lifespan, so you can achieve the best results over a longer period of time, particularly if it is evergreen content.
Do you need expert assistance to improve your SEO strategy or create new targeted content? Contact our experts today for a free consultation: NI/GB +44 2871 228820 ROI +353 1 247 5294. Alternatively, email: [email protected]