We know that not everyone wants to scroll pages and pages of detailed information about how to get the most out of their website. So, we’ve collated a quick and easy guide to creating a website that wows.
Let’s get straight into it…
- SEO STRATEGY.
This is the strategy of optimising a domain and its pages to get your website organically ranked higher on search engine results pages rather than paying for it to be ranked higher.
What this means is that your page will appear higher on search engine results pages so your website is more likely to be clicked on. This is because people will deem your website as the most relevant and let’s be honest, no one wants to scroll through the many pages of google so they will more than likely click on the result that is straight in front of them.
This will lead to increased traffic on your website and therefore more exposure to potential customers and increased brand awareness.
Generally, there are two types of SEO strategy: on-page and off-page.
On-page SEO covers optimising elements within your website such as internal links (more on this later), alt-text and sub-headings.
Off-page SEO covers what you do outside of your website to improve its search engine ranking such as link building, guest posts and various types of marketing (e.g. video and social media).
Throughout this article, you will find that a lot of elements to get your website noticed are associated with SEO, so if you want to become an SEO specialist, keep reading!
- KNOW YOUR KEYWORDS.
This is an important part of SEO. If your keywords aren’t relevant, the search engines won’t find your site and you’ll lose out on all-important website traffic.
Search engines will search through various types of content, including keywords, to determine your website’s relevance to the user’s search. If the search engines can find you easily and your keywords are relevant to the user’s search, they will rank you higher and your website will be more visible on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
You can choose one primary keyword that will be your focus keyword. You can then choose secondary (related) keywords within the content of that page to help the search engines determine what your content is about and if it is relevant to the user’s search.
E.g. your primary keyword may be ‘flowers’ and your secondary keywords may be ‘bouquets’ or ‘hatboxes’.
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- OPTIMISING YOUR METADATA
Another important part of SEO. Metadata is data that provides information to search engines about other data. They will tell search engines what your website is about using keywords which describe the content of your website.
The most important metadata to get your website noticed will be the title tags and the meta description.
The title tag is a HTML code tag that allows you to give your web page a title. These play a crucial role in organic search.
The meta description is a HTML tag that summarises a webpage’s content. It is a short snippet of text that appears under your page title in SERPs.
These two elements must accurately specify what the page is about, but in a way that will catch the audience’s eye. This will make them want to click on your website as opposed to the other websites surrounding it.
- PAID ADVERTISING TOOLS.
Investing in advertising is a quick, effective way to drive traffic to your website. A popular tool to do this is Google Ads using PPC (Pay Per Click).
Google Ads allows you to create and share well-timed ads with your ideal customers when they are searching for products or services like yours. Your website will show up at the top of SERPs, making customers more likely to click on them.
If they do click on your website, you will pay Google Ads as they helped you to get that click. That is where the name ‘pay per click’ comes from as you will only pay if your site is clicked on.
Google Ads also comes with a helpful analytical tool that will help you to determine the impact of your marketing efforts (but that’s for another blog).
- CREATE UNIQUE, QUALITY CONTENT.
As of November 2022, there were estimated to be about 2 billion websites on the internet. Considering the value of this figure, how are you going to stand out?
Start with the content that you are producing. Your content should include words and phrases that are relevant to the content and purpose of your website.
However, your chances of being ranked higher in a search engine results page will come from finding a niche within your business. For example, highlighting specific, specialist or unique products or services you offer.
Google has a helpful, free search keyword tool that will show you how many people were using particular search terms to find things online in the past month. This will help you to decide which keywords are the most appropriate to include in your content.
Content should also be engaging, otherwise, you can bet that your audience will bounce. Your aim is to keep them on your website and interested in your content so make sure to deep dive into topics that are most relevant to your business.
- CREATE PLENTY OF PAGES.
The more content your website has, the easier it is for search engines to find you and information about what your website is all about. The more they understand, the easier it is for them to deem if you’re relevant enough to be in the SERPs or not.
One of the most useful pages that you can create is a blog page. Blogs provide a more diverse set of keywords and also provide a lot of valuable information for search engines to filter through.
Another useful thing to do after creating your pages is to submit a sitemap.
A sitemap is basically a way for Google to navigate around your site when it has a lot of content and activity. If you have recently updated parts of your website, you can resubmit your sitemap which essentially asks Google to crawl your site for updates.
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- USE VISUALS.
There are more ways to appeal to an audience than text. Videos and images are also important to incorporate into your website.
You are unable to search for images in a search engine, so that is where alt-text comes in. Alt-text is essentially the text you add to an image that helps search engines understand what your image is about.
So when a consumer searches for your product, not only will your website come up, but images from your website will too, thus making your website content more visible.
Just remember to try to keep the file small where possible so that the load time of the page is reduced.
Video SEO can also help website visibility so make sure that you are using relevant keywords in your video descriptions and titles to get your content noticed.
- LINKS, LINKS, LINKS.
Links signal to search engines that your site is a quality resource worthy of citation.
There are two types of links: internal links and backlinks.
Internal links help search engines to understand your content better and rank your website more easily. Internal links will indicate to search engines what your website pages are about and how important they are.
Backlinks are essentially a ‘vote of confidence’ from other sites. These are extremely helpful to have. They are when other websites link to pages on your site. This will improve your SEO as search engines will see your content as more credible and valuable so they will rank it higher on the SERPs.
- BE SHAREABLE.
If your audience finds your content valuable, they may want to share it. This is an excellent way to build brand awareness and drive website traffic.
Therefore, when you are creating and publishing content, make sure to include social media and share buttons on the page so that your page can be shared with even more people.
- MAKE YOUR WEBSITE RESPONSIVE.
Mobile users account for approximately 50% of online traffic, so if your website isn’t optimised for mobile users, you could lose out on a lot of that traffic.
Your website should load easily and adapt to all different types of devices to make it more accessible for your customers.
Remember, if they can’t access the website, they can’t access your products or services.
A smooth user experience is also important. The easier a website is to navigate, the longer consumers will stay on it, the more times they will repeat visits and the more they will recommend it to others.
- MATCH YOUR CONTENT TO SEARCH INTENT.
There are 4 categories of search intent:
- Informational such as how to solve a problem.
- Commercial for such as reviews and price comparisons.
- Transactional for purchases and discounted offers.
- Navigational to find the domain name of a brand.
There are many reasons a customer may search for different types of content, so it is important that you match your content to the intent of your searcher, otherwise your page will be useless to them.
For example, for a product page, use words such as ‘offer’, ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’.
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- BUILD BRAND AWARENESS THROUGH CONTENT MARKETING.
This is where you promote your website through other platforms such as social media platforms and other websites.
This will build awareness and will let consumers know that your website exists and drive traffic to it.
Having a network of platforms within your business helps to create trust and credibility around your brand.
You can also interact with customers through social media platforms by posting engaging content. This will display that there is a face behind your brand and will give a more unique customer experience. You can use these interactions to direct people to your website.
You could also repurpose your website content for other platforms. Just wrote an interesting blog? Create some infographics and posts relevant to the blog and share them on your social media platforms. You can then share a link to your blog.
The more awareness you can get about your brand through marketing, the more traffic you will drive to your website.
- DON’T USE A TEMPLATE.
Template websites are tempting, especially when they are showing up in ads telling you how cheap, effective and reliable they are. However, template websites are also renowned for having poor structure, messy code and lousy browser compatibility.
These issues will have a negative impact on your customer’s user experience and your SEO (we all now know how important that is). If your customers are finding your website difficult to navigate or difficult to load, they are probably going to bounce.
Not only this, but your website should also be unique and build a strong sense of brand awareness. The more original your content is, the more memorable your website will be and the more you will be stuck in someone’s head.
Unique Business = Unique Website = Unique User Experience.
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- ADD TO ONLINE DIRECTORIES.
There are online directories that contain the names and addresses of many businesses, that directory should include yours.
You should try to get listed in directories that are industry relevant to you or within your location. Why? Because these directories will generally have high domain rankings, thus, getting a backlink from these sites will help to improve your SEO.
This is especially beneficial for local businesses as consumers may be searching within a specific area.
- USE OTHER PAGES AND PEOPLE.
There are limitless ways you can do this, so we have collated a short list below.
- Reviews boost social appearance through trust and the more reviews you have, the more credible your brand is. Not only this, but the words used within the reviews count towards the total word pool for search term matches. For example, if someone searched ‘best accountant in Durham’, search engines may recognise this in a review and will deem the website more relevant.
- Write guest posts on other sites. Publishing content on other sites, especially ones relevant to your business, will get your site noticed. This will increase your brand’s visibility and drive traffic to your site as you are placing yourself in front of your audience.
- Ask to be featured on another businesses’ platform. For example, in a blog or mentioned in a social media post. This will again lead to more brand exposure.
- Working with highly influential people can also drive traffic to your website. Many businesses are now using influencers to promote their products, services and brand. This gets your business in front of more people and increases brand awareness. Consumers are then more likely to visit your site as it has been recommended by someone whose opinion is valuable to them.
Feel like your website needs a bit of something you’ve read in this blog? Give us a call and we can hand you over to our friendly and experienced web design and development team.