SEO or ‘search engine optimisation’ as it’s also known, helps increase traffic to your website by making your site more visible in search results. By optimising your online content a search engine like Google is more likely to show it in the top results for searches of a certain keyword. Whether customers can find you easily and quickly can make a huge difference to the success of your business, so naturally wanting to learn how to improve SEO for local business in the UK is priority for many companies. Want to learn how to improve your SEO and drive more visitors to your website? Here are some of our top tips to get started
Get clarity on what your customers want
Before you take the plunge into the complicated world of SEO, you need to think about what your business provides for its customers. You can’t optimise your website without knowing what they’re looking for. How do your customers typically search for you, and how? If there is a term you think people might type in to Google to look for your business type it into Google and see what comes up. With a bit of brainstorming and searching you should have a good idea what your main keywords are.
Using your keywords
Once you know what your keywords are, they should be added to every page of your site to let customers know that you have what they’re looking for. Adding keywords also involves adding them to the title tag and the body of your content. You can look at working your primary keyword(s) into your URL and H1 tag on the page, the meta description and alt-text of images on the page, all of these places will help let search engines know what your content is really about.
Optimise Your Title Tags
Title tags are the titles of your pages. They are at the very top of your browser in the blue area. These may seem unimportant, but they are actually one of the most vital elements of SEO. The simplest way to optimise your title tags is to add one keyword and a bit of description to let your visitors know what the page is about and so that people who are searching for you can find you easier.
Optimise Your File Names
Search engines don’t just look at your title tags. They will also look the file names of your pages and images. To optimise your file names you will need find a theme or focus for each particular page. For example, if you’re optimising for people searching for an employee of your company, then you might name the page “howard-robinson.html” and have a photo named “howard-robinson.jpg”. Don’t worry about using hyphens. They’re the best way of separating words in file names and lots better than having all the words together in one big jumble or by using underscores.
Optimise Your Content
Once you’ve chosen a title tag and file names, you will need to add the same words throughout the content of the page. Don’t go overboard, though. You might get the attention of Google, but you’ll lose the interest of real human beings. People are likely to be unimpressed by poor phrasing and pages stuffed with SEO strategies.
It’s better to work them in as naturally as possible to the content on your page and make sure everything scans normally. Good places to add keywords unobtrusively include headlines and sub-headers, and you can add a few more relevant words around the rest of your copy.
Once you’ve followed these steps you’re on your way to improving your SEO. However, effective search engine optimisation can often be a time consuming and complicated process with new aspects expanding and being updated all the time. At Webential we provide a fantastic SEO service and can handle all aspects of web optimisation for your business. Contact us today to see how we can help you.
