SEO Tips for Clients
If you’re in the process of having a new website designed and made for you, and you’re a little confused about SEO and what it is/does. Don’t worry, a lot of it is common sense and I’ll give you a few quick tips to consider when planning content for your website.
First of all, what is SEO and why is it important? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and the aim of the game is to make your website easy to find via search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, etc. After all, what’s the point of having a website if nobody can find it!?
Top SEO Tips
- The number one rule is – design for people not search engines!
Don’t get too bogged down in what the search engines are looking for, just think about your users and what they’re looking for. If your website is easy to use and your content is useful, helpful, and easy to read, then you’re onto a winner! - Think about your keywords and phrases but don’t let them dictate what you write.
A keyword or phrase is what your potential customer will type into a search engine in order to find your website. So it’s important to make sure those keywords/phrases are included in your content. But if you think you can just repeat the same keyword over and over within your content to boost you up the search engine rankings, you’d be wrong. Your content needs to make sense and be easy to read, if you just keep repeating yourself, your user will soon leave and not come back. Remember the number one rule – people over search engines! - Minimum Requirements
A minimum of 300 words per page is a good guide to work to and try to include at least one image. If you have a lot of content, think about how you can break it up into easy to digest bite size chunks. Speak to your web designer for some creative ways to do this. - Be Mobile Friendly
Is your website easy to use on a mobile? If not, this is not good for the user and your SEO ranking will drop. So make sure your website is suitable for multiple devices. - Diversity
Search engines don’t like serving up lots of similar pages with similar content in their search results. So if your competitor is talking about the same thing as you, try and think of saying it in a different way, maybe with a video blog or an infographic – think outside the box. - Refresh
Keep your site up to date and add new content regularly. A good way to do this is by adding a blog and writing articles, once a week would be great, but once a few months would suffice. - Social Media
Another good way to keep content on your site up to date is by linking your social feeds to your site. Also, the more followers you have on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok… whatever the next big thing is… the more traffic you can drive to your website. Although Google doesn’t use the number of followers as an SEO measurement, having a large following can only be a good thing. The downside of social media is if you don’t use it regularly and let your account gather dust, it could go against you, so only link to them if you update and post things regularly. - Reviews
The best form of marketing is word of mouth, recommendations from friends has always had the highest conversion rate. The next best thing is online reviews. Using trusted review websites like Trust Pilot, Yell, Trip Advisor, Facebook and Google will help Google decide how popular and trusted your website is. - Guest Authors / Influencers
It’s hard writing for a blog, trying to come up with new ideas every week. So why not ask a guest author to write a post for you? If you can ask someone popular within your industry to post an article on your website, you can use their good reputation to your advantage and get more shares via social media, reaching out to more new readers. This is also a good way to generate back links, the more links you have to your website from reputable sources the better. - Get a good Web Designer
There are a lot of technical issues that need addressing to help improve SEO, but don’t worry about these. If your web designer is any good, they’ll take care of them for you. SEO should come as a standard service with any website, it’s a necessity and should be treated as such. So I include technical SEO as part of my web design service and not an optional add on.
I hope that helps you understand a bit more about SEO and what you can do to help improve it on your website. If you have any further questions, just get in touch.