If you have a website, you’re likely to have heard of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. These terms refer to strategies leveraged to help websites rise up the rankings of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and thus making them more visible to consumers. 

Since according to HubSpot, 75 percent of searchers never go past the first page of search results, working on SEO is essential to business success. Put simply, If you aren’t optimising your website and keeping up with the trends, then your ranking competitors surely are.

The world of SEO is pretty darn complex and – at times – overwhelming. It often seems that once getting the hang of a certain SEO technique, the next week enters a new ‘secret’ hack or growth tactic that promises to have you climbing the ladder of search engine success.

The importance of SEO in growing your business cannot be understated though, and if you ever needed a sign to get started on increasing your search engine rankings… this is it! 

Here at HdE AGENCY, we’ve helped many of our clients in the technology industry implement successful SEO campaigns that have increased website traffic dramatically. If you’re looking for somewhere to get started, below we have put together simple do’s and don’ts for SEO.

DON’T keyword-stuff

Too often we find businesses eager to climb the rankings guilty of “keyword stuffing”. This is a black hat SEO strategy that goes against Google’s guidelines which involve the overuse of keywords in an attempt to try and achieve higher rankings.

Instead of this, you want to make sure you are naturally integrating specific, relevant keywords on individual pages that serve a meaningful purpose. If you endeavour to pack each paragraph with every keyword you can think of related to your business, Google won’t respond kindly and in fact, you’re likely to be penalised for it.

 

DON’T disregard slow page speeds

Today’s modern consumer has very limited patience. If any of your web pages take a long time to load, you should expect your visitors to very quickly hit the back button and head on over to your competitor’s faster loading website. According to SEO guru, Neil Patel, 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.

Now, two seconds may not seem very long at all, but for page speed, it can feel like an eternity. Some tips for speeding up your page loading time include:

• Compressing your images
• Cashing your website pages
• Improving your server response time
• Limited your redirects
• Delete unnecessary plugins.
• Minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
• Use external hosting platforms

DON’T ignore user search intent

User Search Intent refers to what users want to find when they are conducting a search. Understanding and satisfying search intent is Google’s ultimate priority. If someone Googles “best cybersecurity management software”, they likely aren’t looking for an article on home security practices. If we take a look at the below search results on this, we can see the top search results are websites selling or reviewing cybersecurity management software. 

 

 

With that in mind, if you would like to rank your pages on page one of Google in 2021, you need to truly understand search intent as an SEO best practice when producing a piece of content for your website. Ensure you are continuously acknowledging user intent for your target keywords. For instance, is it informational, transactional, navigational, or commercial?

Once you create content that aligns with the search intent of your target audience, you’ll be certain to increase your rankings.

DO create title tags and meta descriptions

Your page title and meta descriptions are extremely valuable elements of your website content. Title tags are the clickable headlines that appear in search results and play a crucial role in SEO. According to Google:

“Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”

Search engines like Google typically display the first 50-60 characters of a title. Your title needs to draw users in, and including the target keyword is one way to do that.

DO track your website metrics

There’s very little use in carrying out the SEO practices if you’re not tracking them to see if they’re working for you. Keeping up with some basic site metrics will allow you to uncover patterns on where to improve, including conversion rate, traffic flow, bounce rate, and click-through rate.

It’s really simple and straightforward to monitor the above metrics using free tools such as Google Analytics. Everything you need to know can be set up and monitored, enabling you to keep track of all of your SEO efforts to see which methods are paying off, and which one’s may need revising. 

DO create the best UX

Another important piece of SEO advice is to ensure your content is as user-friendly as possible. Lengthy blocks of homogeneous text os a no-go as this will likely deter users from your page. Instead, break up your content into smaller paragraphs, using lists, headings, and subheadings to divide your content into much more inviting chunks.

Adding images, videos and other media is another successful way to improve the user experience for your pages in order to increase your SERPs rankings. Including video content and other media on your site will also increase the time users spend on your website (dwell time), another factor that contributes to SEO.

DO focus on getting authoritative backlinks

Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another, and this plays a key role in SEO. Search engines, such as Google, consider backlinks as votes of confidence. In a nutshell, the more votes (or backlinks) your web pages have, the more likely it is that it will rank for relevant search queries. 

An effective strategy is by creating quality content that will warrant high page rank. Link building is all about positioning your quality content and getting related sites to link to you.

For instance, let’s say you are a SaaS startup and you get an inbound link from an article directory. Search engines such as Google are unlikely to see that website link as relevant to the subject of your SaaS website.

On the other hand, if the link is from a website that is related to your SaaS business in some way, like a technology news platform or a SaaS review site, you will not only increase in SERP rankings, but your site will also be relevant and deliver value to users who visit it. This, in turn, will enable you to build backlinks and improve rankings.

Do you need an SEO agency to track your campaign and drive qualified traffic? Get in touch with our wonderful team today.