Digital Growth Programme consultant Ian Lockwood is an SEO expert. Ian has given some actionable steps on improving your website pages to help it appear higher in search rankings, with some tips on creating content that your audiences may be looking for.
Whilst it is very much business not as usual for everyone now, at some point the economic taps will begin to open again and companies will want to be well-placed to make the most of it. SEO is famously a “long game”, with the benefits coming some time after optimisations have been made to a website.
It is also a process of continuous improvement, where adding fresh content, making pages load faster and improving the user experience are the steps on an ongoing journey to better rankings. It makes sense then, to work on your website now to get the benefit when times are better.
Perhaps the highest impact opportunity is adding more content to your site, whether expanding existing pages or adding new ones. The key is providing useful information to users, answering their questions, going deeper into the topics your business touches on. I am definitely not advocating padding out pages with waffle just to make them longer!
Start by reviewing questions you regularly get asked by customers; maybe you have email queries from people, or make a list of all the things you remember being asked by customers recently. Use tools such as seoscout.com/suggest or answerthepublic.com to find the questions and information users are searching for about your topics. Make a list of all the suitable queries and group them together where they’re closely related, creating a list of pages to write.
For queries that are a little esoteric or beyond “common questions”, blog posts are fine. You don’t have to publish them all at once – build a stockpile of content ready for publishing in the future when you’re busy with other things. Try to write informative content that isn’t too “salesy” and that gives clear, straightforward explanations. Keep your sentence structures simple and be direct and specific when answering questions; Google is more likely to understand and reward your content with higher rankings.
It’s also a good time to conduct a technical audit of your site. Run some of your key pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (https://bit.ly/emc-psi) and talk to your web developer about implementing its recommendations. Review the Coverage report in Google Search Console (https://bit.ly/emc-gsc) to check for errors and wrongly-excluded pages that you can fix. If you want to go deeper, download Sitebulb (sitebulb.com) and run a crawl to get more SEO recommendations for your site.
Every improvement you make now will pay dividends in the future, so there’s no time like the present!
If you want to learn more about digital marketing techniques like these, join the Digital Growth Programme at their next webinar. Visit our events section.
