SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

When people need what, your business has to offer, how do they find you? Over 85% of consumers surveyed, find businesses they need by searching online. So how do you make sure when they type a question into Google, your website comes up on the first page? SEO! Optimising your website to better appeal to the search engines algorithms!

Now despite what many "Guaranteed 1st page" SEO companies say, there's no exact science to SEO. The Algorithms Google (and Bing and Yahoo) uses are constantly changing and adapting. But their purpose - to give searchers what they're looking for - remains. Appearing on Google's first page wont happen over night, but the easiest way to move up the results is to provide quality, up to date, valuable information your customers wants to know.

Here are some ways to improve your SEO :

• Update your content often. Google isn't likely to rank a website that hasn't been changed a year.
• Word your website content to include keywords and terms and questions people are searching for. If your website mentions "Quality coffee in Brisbane" several times throughout the paragraphs, you're more likely to appear when people search those terms. Be careful that you don't hide key words or cheat. Google knows. 
• Use your headings wisely. You should have different levels of headings, which means Heading 1 is the most important, overview of what they'll find. Keywords within your subheadings of Headings 2 and 3 will still be ranked highly to search engines. Bold and emphasized text is also scanned for key words before the body of your text. The algorithms are designed to determine if your block of text is relevant to the search terms entered. 
• Use your alternate text on images! They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words, however Google's crawling robots which search the web and rank websites cant determine the value of an image. When creating your website, depending on the platform you've used, there'll be a way to add "alternate text" to an image, which if the image doesn't display, the text will instead. This is what the algorithms read, so picture of coffee beans wont mean much in search results, unless it's alternative text is "Quality coffee beans in Brisbane".
• Link legitimately to your website often. From social media, emails, blogs or partner's websites. The algorithms determine that if everyone is linking to your site, it must have something people want. Be careful not to buy links or spam your links in comment sections. Google knows.
• Have landing pages! Which means specific pages that answer specific questions. Google will see an entire page focused on exact question the search has entered, and rank it highly. If you have one line answers for a dozen questions, it doesn't look as valuable to Google's algorithms.
• Know your target market! If you're selling to first time mums, don't write like you're selling to big corporation CEOs, or high school boys.

​If you need some help with your SEO, or aren't sure how to find what your audience is searching for:

Contact me!