At the moment everything happens online, we are a society driven by digital technology. Even in developing countries with no easy access to water you will find owners of smartphones. How we communicate our brand to consumers has changed - Digital Marketing now has an incredible influence on our interactions, purchases, work and life habits. Where once television, radio, billboards and direct mail dominated the industry, companies today must utilise the digital universe in order to enhance brand engagement.
An important aspect in any Digital Marketing plan is SEO, which stands for Search Engine
Optimisation. It’s the practice of optimising your web pages so they rank a high position in
organic search engine results, which is non paid search results.
Businesses which appear
first on search engines indicate trustworthiness and competence than those that aren’t
ranked. It is vitally important for small businesses to utilise SEO techniques in order to
create a strong online presence therefore remaining competitive in the market. SEO helps you
gain high visibility to those interested in a particular service or query, which can
generally lead to more potential leads and sales.
The key to a successful SEO strategy is to identify the most important factors that affect your website’s search ranking and then optimise your website and strategy accordingly. You must be able to adapt and adjust to the latest SEO trends. Below we have listed some of the most important factors to be aware of and how SEO can add benefit:
Ensuring your website is fully optimised across different devices - your customers expect a
great browsing experience regardless of what device they use. How your company’s website
appears and its ease of use is highly important.
A large part of algorithms which search
engines use is the quality and experience of your mobile, desktop and tablet offering. The
focus should be on navigation, easy completion of forms, visibility, and load time. This can
all impact how your website is ranked on Google and other search engines, is your website
informative? Is it giving users a good experience? If not it may be time for a relaunch!
Mobile optimisation is especially important as from July 1st, 2019, mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search). Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. This can become a major issue for websites not optimised for mobile use, considering most of our Google searches begin on smartphones.
Ensuring the images on your website are fully optimised are also crucial for search engine
ranking, this is especially true for e-commerce websites as you can highly benefit from
gaining customers through Google’s images.
In order to achieve this images should be clearly
and descriptively titled and described through image Alt Tags as well as selecting the
correct file type. Adding your images to a sitemap can also help Google discover images that
we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code).
Image size must be optimised also, this involves reducing the file size without affecting the image quality so the page load times remain low. This will boost your image exposure especially for product images and decorative images in ranking higher in Google and other search engines. Slow loading times on a website can push potential visitors away also, remember the key here is to always ensure each page is extremely user friendly.
Auditing your website is key to improving content and user experience on your website, an SEO
audit is best done by someone who knows what they are looking for. As this involves changes
to the code of the web page, meta descriptions, header tags, alt tags, image optimisation,
page speed, responsive page design and much more.
A website must be monitored over time and
kept up to date or your it will eventually ‘burnout’ meaning it could become ‘not found’
because it is down or is slow in nature, this could involve losing business in real time and
brand credibility by the second - and you can’t make a first impression twice!
At RANE we offer a complimentary free website audit tool that will perform an SEO analysis across all of the major website data points. Our Google certified team are ready to help you increase your online visibility!
View Our Services and Get a FREE Audit