18 Jul 2017
Businesses are realising the potential of using digital technology as more and more firms are investing in their brands online. However, simply developing a new website and creating social media pages is not enough. To get a return on your investment in a website, it is important to consider search engine optimisation (SEO) – after all, no one will be able to visit your exciting, new website if they can’t find it!
In this blog post, we break down the basics of SEO and explain how it can help your firm to thrive in a digital environment.
Why use SEO?
SEO helps to boost your website’s searchability on search engines and generate traffic to your website. A website with good SEO will be easier to find in search engines, and appear higher in a list of search results. For firms with little or no technical knowledge, implementing SEO into your site may seem daunting. However, it doesn’t have to be complicated, and with a little consideration, it can provide your website with a much needed boost online.
To help you understand SEO better, we have broken it down into two parts: on-site SEO and off-site SEO. A good SEO strategy will always include an efficient mix of both on-site and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO
On-site SEO refers to making your website appealing to both visitors and search engines when they visit your website.
For visitors, it will be all about the user experience and how easy your website is to view and navigate. You will also need to ensure that your website is mobile responsive and loads correctly when viewed on different web browsers on devices such as desktops, notebooks, smartphones and tablets.
Search engines evaluate your website from behind the scenes – looking at the HTML of your website, assessing whether keywords appear in your website content, URL, HTML tags and meta descriptions, and evaluating your XML sitemap. Much of on-site SEO therefore revolves around keywords that accurately describe the content on your site. It is important to spend time on keyword research and target relevant words for inclusion in the optimum places on your website.
If you are an accountancy firm based in Bristol, for example, some of the keywords you may wish to use are ‘accountants in Bristol’, ‘accountant in Bristol’, ‘accountants near Bristol’, ‘accountancy firm Bristol’, ‘best accountants in Bristol’ or ‘Bristol accounting company’. You’ll also want to make sure you include these keywords in the page titles, website URLs and website content.
Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO deals with promoting your website online through link building, content marketing and paid advertising. Search engines are more likely to rank your website higher if there are a number of credible websites linking to your site. Consider linking your website to your social media pages, online directories and professional bodies, such as the ICAEW.
Another great way of generating links to your website is by creating fresh content that you can share. A blog section and latest news pages are great places to post content. This can then be shared on your social media pages, and link back to your website.
You may also want to consider investing in paid online advertising via Google AdWords or Bing Ads. These allow you to pay for text ads to appear in search engine results, thus potentially pointing new traffic to your website.
Monitor your website traffic
Once you have taken care of on-site and off-site SEO, you will want to continually monitor and assess your website traffic. You can gain valuable insight into your clients’ behaviour – what they are searching for when they come across your website, how much time they are spending on your website and which pages they look at when they visit your website.
Most search engines offer a number of free analytics tools, such as Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools. With these, you can view which pages on your website are the most popular and receiving the most traffic. You can use Google’s Search Console to find out if your website is working correctly or to view a diagnostic analysis of your website. Individuals can also utilise Search Console to look at the keywords visitors are using to find your website.
Practice Track Online provides businesses with a SEO strategy designed to generate genuine, relevant leads for your firm. We optimise five key phrases, and monitor these on an ongoing basis to ensure that search engines are traversing your site. For more information, click here. Alternatively, please call us on 0800 181 343, or email info@practicetrackonline.co.uk.
View more posts from our archive