When it comes to marketing for your website or business there are many ways to increase traffic, although one marketing initiative every business should consider is Search Engine Optimisation. Google (2019) state that there are over 3.5 Billion searches on google every day (Thats 40,000 searches a second!). SEO can capitalise on missed traffic via a selection of simple improvments to a website!

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is the process of optimising a website or blog post to gain ‘free’ or ‘organic’ traffic from popular search engines such as Google. This is achieved through several different alterations to a website that make the search engine algorithm more inclined to display your web-page higher up a search engine’s results page. The main goal of SEO is to make the search algorithm understand that your website is relevant to as many search queries as possible. One example of this would be to first understand what the most frequent synonyms to your website or service are being used in search engines and then use these keywords in your website or blog post. Using the most frequently used language in search engines on your web page will increase your google ranking factor (J, Shi. 2014). There are many other techniques in which SEO can increase a websites traffic, such as: Optimising images, Keywords, Loading speeds, Header tags and many more.

Let’s take a look at ways in which you can apply SEO to your website! 

How to Use SEO:

• Research your demographic’s most frequently used search phrases and keywords and edit accordingly:

You can use a host of different websites to look at and analyse search engine data, one of which is Ahrefs.com which provides a range of different SEO tools! Once you have researched and found out the most used keywords or phrases relevant to your website or industry, you can start to re-evaluate your own writing on your web page and compare the phrases used to what your target audience are searching for. Make adjustments based on what you find, one key point to note is that the ‘H1’ or web page’s heading, is a very large contributing factor to what google believes your website to be about. The main goal of this step is to make it easy for search engines to understand what your content is about.

• Apply off-page SEO techniques:

‘Off-page SEO’ refers to techniques such as link-building or bookmarking capabilities all of which contribute to an increase in traffic to your site in addition to making your website have more worthy content in the eyes of the search algorithm. One very valkuable form of off-page SEO is giving the site user the option to share your website or embedded promotion through social media websites such as: Twitter, Instagram, Faceboook or Snapchat. This can provide an opportunity for high traffic growth in a short time frame by content going ‘Viral’ and being shared in high volumes.

• Stay on top of the trends:

Set up an action plan that designates yourself or your business to frequently monitor trends and changes in search engine rankings in terms of where your website is in comparison to your competitors, what keywords are becoming more popular and what parent-phrases are leading to your website. By staying on top of this information you can gain a greater understanding of the demographic and gain the ability to possibly predict trends or outcomes through data correlation and analysis.

Potential Risks?:

One mistake that some website designers make is to use ‘keyword stuffing’ this is the act of repeatedly including popular keywords or phrases on your website without them having context or providing any value to the user. Not only does this make your website look unprofessional, google have stated that the algorithm actively red lists websites flagged to be using key words stuffing (Google, 2019).

For more information, check out this expertly produced video on SEO by the internet data analysis company Ahrefs (2018).

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References:

• J, Shi. Y, Cao, X, Zhao. (2014) ‘Research on SEO strategies of university journal websites’, Journal of International Information Science and Engineering, 4(6), pp. 13-19.
• Ahrefs, (2018). SEO For Beginners: A Basic Search Engine Optimisation Tutorial for Higher Google Rankings. available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvwS7cV9GmQ
• Google (2019). Google Search Analytics and Trends. available: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US