You are a business owner, right? You have the knowledge, the niche and the business know-how to make your business a success, but do you know your SEO? You may not be hands-on with your website, but you need to know the basics of SEO at least to make sure that your web designer, digital marketing agency or in-house website manager are doing their job properly.
If you are a little confused about what search engine optimisation is, help is at hand in this 2021 SEO guide for business owners. You will learn all the basics you need to know to keep your business's website running at the top of its game.
Your SEO Business Guide
The Internet is permanently evolving and growing. Back at its start there were few website and it was easy to get your basic website found for the search terms you wanted to be found for. Roll on to 2021 and there are around two billion websites in existence, with the smallest businesses competing with world giants.
The Internet is crowded, to say the least, and it is becoming ever more difficult for you to be more prominent than your competitors. To be in with a chance of out-performing the competition, your website must be fully optimised for search engines, enabling you to get traffic, sales and conversions.
Google is without doubt the largest and most important search engine out there. In the UK it dominates with around 88% of all searches on the Internet.
Statistics by Statista
The thing about search engines is that they use algorithms to improve search results. The algorithm is what will dictate where your web page ends up in the search results. Algorithms change frequently, when the search engine makes a change to improve the quality of the search results.
Changing algorithms can be serious for any website and therefore business. Your website could go from being number 1 in the search results for a keyword to disappearing altogether. Conversely, a low ranking web page could end up in the top spot. Algorithm tweaks can have serious consequences.
Google uses multiple algorithms for its search results and nobody knows what the exact criteria are for the best results. It is therefore a game of keeping an eye on your website's performance on a regular basis to catch ranking changes as soon as possible.
Good SEO practices will help you keep up the rankings, so here are the main things you should be aware of and implement on your website.
Does Your Website Conform To Google's Advice?
High-Quality Content
To have any chance of success in the search rankings, your website must meet Google's quality standards and conform to best-practice SEO standards.
First and foremost, every page and post of your website must contain high-quality content, which is relevant to the topic of the page or post and is ideally unique content. Google states that high-quality content "is the single most important thing to do".
Look through your website - is your content of high-quality, or could it be better written? If it could be better, have it rewritten as soon as possible. Writing content is not to everybody's taste or ability. It may be that you need to hire a professional copywriter to get the results you need.
Backlinks
Backlinks on your web pages are one of the next most important things to consider. Backlinks are hyperlinks which lead to other pages, either within your own website, or to an external source.
In the bad old days, website owners used to buy up masses of backlinks, usually from very low quality, if not dodgy sources. They were then seen to have a large number of backlinks by Google.
Times have changed, though. Google now has the ability to understand whether a backlink is a good one or a poor one. Guess what? There is an algorithm for that! Your website will get the thumbs up for backlinks which are relevant to the content on the page and refer to other web pages which are on the same topic.
Google uses backlinks as a sort of spider's web to link high-quality content on the same topic. Therefore, always make sure your links are relevant and lead to pages which are high quality.
Is Your Website Trying To Fool Google?
In the bad old days, fooling Google and the search engines was relatively simple. You could stuff your web pages with keywords, or even repeat the same keywords over and over again. Those days are long gone. Only a fool would try to fool Google in 2021!
Keyword stuffing will get your web page or entire website blacklisted. Techniques which used to be employed include keyword stuffing and then making the text the same colour as the page's background. This was invisible to humans, but could be picked up by the search engines. Google has yet another algorithm which picks up this type of behaviour, so it is just not worth doing.
What Google wants to see is a website which is designed first and foremost for human visitors, not robots. If you have a good backlink strategy you will give your website another helping hand to success.
Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?
Google places great important on websites being mobile-friendly. That means the website should be responsive. A responsive website will render the content of the page in a layout best-suited to each screen size the page is being viewed on.
If you look at an old website, you will find that the content is unreadable on a smartphone as you get the same view as a desktop user. On a responsive website, the text, images and other content will flow so that it is easy to read and interact with.
Google prioritises mobile-friendly websites by rewarding websites which are totally mobile-friendly, as on average 60% of websites are viewed on a mobile device - smartphone or tablet.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, you need to have it rebuilt as a priority.
Does Your Website Load Quickly?
The speed at which your web page loads is yet another criteria Google looks at. People are impatient and if the page does not load almost instantly, you will lose the visitor. Therefore, Google measures your page speed and rewards fast loading pages with better rankings.
Things which affect page speed include images, videos and other non-text content. Make sure your images are optimised before uploading them to your website. In the perfect world, you will change the file's name to be relevant to the page's content. Using a tool such as PhotoShop or an online file size reducer, compress your image so that it is as small as possible - in single or double figure kilobytes, ideally. Only then should you upload the image. You can save further file size by using a compression tool like Smush on your website. Once uploaded, take the time and make the effort to give your images alt tags and title descriptions. This will improve the SEO of your web page.
Videos should not be hosted on your own website, as they are very resource hungry and will slow your website down. You can host videos on YouTube, Vimeo or Amazon S3 storage and then embed the video into your page. This will ensure a much quicker page speed.
Other SEO Considerations
Websites which are not secure are being penalised or can even be almost inaccessible. Some browsers put up a full page warning that the page you are trying to view in unsafe as it is insecure. This is all about an SSL certificate encrypting and protecting your website. an SSL certificate is visible to the user by showing a padlock in the address bar and the website will start with "https://www....", father than the insecure "http://www...".
The insecure website will send all traffic (including contact form data and shopping transactions) in plain text. With an SSL certificate the entire content of your website will be fully encrypted. Make sure your website is encrypted, or expect to see it losing in the search rankings.
How Is Your Website Performing?
Ask us to review your website for FREE. We'll give you suggestions for how you could improve your website's performance with SEO or marketing campaigns.
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