SEO (or search engine optimization) has grown in importance and popularity with local and international businesses alike for its ability to help businesses reach new customers.
No matter your product or service, an SEO agency or digital marketing firm that offers SEO as a service can help your business gain organic search traffic from your search engine of choice.
Upon the last estimate in 2021, the SEO services industry’s market was worth around £43.9 billion worldwide, with a projected growth to £53.7 billion by the end of 2022. That’s a compound annual growth rate of around 22%.
It’s clear that SEO works, and businesses are investing serious money into incorporating SEO into their marketing plan.
So, what if you want to get into SEO or do some SEO for your website? Today, we’ll share our top 5 SEO tips and explore the dos and don’ts of SEO!
What Exactly Is Search Engine Optimisation?
Before delving into what to do and not do for SEO and our handy tips, we need to have a firm understanding of what SEO is. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what SEO is and does.
SEO describes the process of optimising a website for a search engine. It usually constitutes part of a digital marketing plan and focuses on growing organic traffic to a website. It is important to make this distinction, as paid traffic to a website isn’t the main focus of an SEO campaign, and that would fall under the umbrella of advertising.
When you hire an SEO specialist, they’ll optimise your site to rank on a search engine of your choice. This could be Google and Bing or other search engines such as YouTube and TikTok. It all depends on your goals and customer demographic.
The SEO specialist will accomplish this by identifying target search terms called keywords in your business niche and then devising a plan to rank your website for those search terms.
This can involve everything from applying technical SEO to writing thousands of words in website page content aimed at ranking for a range of different but niche-specific keywords.
Tip One: Don’t Ignore User Intent
This is a big one for anyone wanting to get into SEO or for someone looking to hire SEO services. Ensure that your SEO plan is focused on user intent. Every search term typed into a search engine will have intent.
These could be:
- User intent to buy a product
- To learn more about a product or service
- To search for a service
- To learn more about a subject
As a business, you’ll primarily want to focus on search terms with commercial intent. There’s no point in optimising your website for informational keywords if you are trying to sell a product or service.
Tip Two: Do Use Long-Tail Keywords
It is easy to fall into the trap of using only short-tail or single-word keywords. While it is important to rank for certain shorter phrases on a top-level basis, these should not be the only kind of keywords you rank for.
Long-tail keywords have an abundance of SEO value and can help you boost your rankings for more competitive but semantically related keywords. For example:
Top Level Keyword: Tomato Seeds
Long-tail Keyword Variant: Tomato Seeds Near Me
Long-tail keywords also help you narrow down user intent, meaning you are more likely to gain relevant traffic about tomatoes and their seeds on your website.
Tip Three: Don’t Keyword Stuff
So, if you want to rank for tomato seeds, why not just put that in every sentence naturally? Well, that would be keyword stuffing. Search engines like Google will notice if a keyword is mentioned too many times and penalise your website.
It is important to mention keywords but only mention them in moderation. A good rule of thumb is to have one primary keyword you want a page to rank for and a few semantically related secondary and tertiary keywords (such as long tail variants) to support it.
Generally, keep your keyword density between 1-3%.
Tip Four: Do Optimise Your Meta Information
Meta information is important for signalling your search engine of choice and what your page or website is about. Meta information is aspects such as a page’s title tag and meta description.
For a meta description:
- Keep it under 160 characters but over 130 characters.
- Include your primary keyword once.
For a title tag:
- Keep it under 60 characters but over 30 characters.
- Include your primary keyword once.
Tip Five: Don’t Settle For A Slow Website
A slow, unresponsive website damages your SEO more than you’d think. Why would Google (or any search engine) want to slow down and negatively impact their user experience by ranking slow and unresponsive websites?
Think of all the times you’ve been on hold waiting for a customer service representative to answer. It isn’t a nice feeling! A slow website speed is equivalent, and search engines notice this.
Using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix, you can find out what (if anything) is slowing your site down and put a plan in place to fix it.
Before You Go…
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