Five Easy Ways to Improve Your SEO

If your organic traffic has dropped and these days you’re relying on existing clients to come back to you for work rather than new clients you can wow with your pizazz, it’s possible your website could do with a bit (a lot?) of work on the SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, front. And it’s not going to take long, either.

How to improve your SEO – and you don’t need years to do it

Time is of the essence for just about everyone in the 21^st century and we know you don’t want to spend hours/months/years on improving your SEO, so we’ve found five easy ways to improve your SEO.

Know your audience

Who’s your audience? What do they do with their lives? What are the problems that they would turn to Google to solve? And where does your business fit in all of that? The first key to great SEO is knowing what your audience needs from you, and this is best found in the form of keywords, or the terms and phrases most commonly searched in Google when an audience looks for a business like yours. Of course, you can’t just make these up. The best way to figure out what keywords work best for your business and industry (in order of cost) and improve your SEO is to start thinking like a consumer and taking note of how you search for things, buy a keyword research programme like Market Samurai or SEMrush, or hire someone to do keyword research and Google Analytics for your, even if it’s just for a few hours a week.

Create high-quality credible content – regularly

Improving your SEO is not just about writing any old content and chucking it up on a blog somewhere; it’s about creating high-quality credit content that’s valuable, relevant and helpful to your audience. Yep, there are so many adjectives, yet they’re all just as important as each other. It’s essential that you create content that gives your customers what they’re looking for, in a way that keeps them coming back for more. Include keywords in your text, but don’t even think about repeating them over and over or try to make them ‘invisible;’ those sneaky tricks worked once upon a time, but that time is not now and Google will continue to ignore you and even ban your site from appearing on rankings at all.

‘Regular’ is also an essential keyword to take notice of here. If the last time you updated your blog was in 2009 but your competitor updates two blogs a week, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that your competitor will be seen as a more credible and high-quality source of information. Post regularly to establish yourself as an expert and improve your SEO. Post infrequently to stay at the bottom of Google’s rankings.

And if you don’t have time to create and post regular content, get someone else to do it. Find someone who gets you and your business brand then hire them to create your unique content on a regular basis. Talk to the Lingo team who can help you with content marketing.

Publish reviews and testimonies on your website

Speaking of credibility and being an expert in your field, the more your clients tell the world about how awesome your business is, the more you’ll improve your SEO too. Ask every client you work with to write a quick blurb about you. It doesn’t have to be much, but it does need to reinforce your status as an expert in your field. That’s free advertising right there, people, so use it.

Put keywords at the top of your content

If you’re going to include keywords anywhere at all, make sure they’re in your title and first paragraph, at least. The higher up the page, the more likely Google’s magical little elves will find them.

Include links to other pages

Google likes to create a big happy community of content, which means that content needs to talk to each other. The easiest way to do this and help improve your SEO is to insert links to other pages within your content – and not just to your own pages. When you link to other pages within your content, don’t just write ‘click here’ either. Write out the destination of your URL in sentence form so it’s filled with content-rich keywords.

• Bad: For more egg recipes, click here. (Just tricking – there ain’t no link here.)
• Good: When you’re looking for egg recipes perfect for whole family, you can’t go past Alison Holst’s five-minute egg recipes. (Tricked you again!)