5 Simple Steps To Take Your Shop Online
All you need to know about seo…

What is SEO?​

Are you an owner of a growing, thriving business? Or maybe you are looking for something to help monetize and promote your online content? Look no further! The goal in this blog is to provide you with a basic strategy when it comes down to SEO.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a process that often features making some modifications to your website in order to improve user experience and your own online presence within a search engine. This process occurs majority of the time organically inside of a search engine. However, this isn’t always the case as sometimes when you search a specific keyword you will notice relevant paid advert websites pop up which isn’t classed as organic traffic.

Stop right there!

 

Before you continue reading, we wanted to explain some key terms that are important (and handy!) to know when it comes to understanding the behaviour of search engines and in particular Google, which we will be focusing on.

Optimisation – Modifications made to your content in order to make it better suited or more effective for search engines.

Crawling – This is a process that Google uses in order to understand your website and the content on it through looking at your site-map

Indexing – Once Google has crawled your website it gets stored in Google’s index which is essentially the web search. This means that once Google has understood your websites content it will put it onto the search engine granting user access.

Concentrated Traffic – Users entering the website through specific keywords that have been used within the content of the website.

In a rush?

 

If you haven’t got the time to read the full blog, don’t worry! We have constructed you a skeleton SEO strategy that will provide you with a starting point for each step in order to help you optimise your website and bring in more organic and concentrated traffic.

Strategy Summary:

1. Create a list of topics that you want to include on your website.

2. Break these topics up and branch keywords off each of them.

3. Now you can start putting together and building the pages.

4. Set up a blog page to generate fresh content or new specific landing pages.

5. Optimise media and content prior to uploading it onto the website.

6. Track the traffic on your website. Where is everyone going? A good analytical tool is HotJar which we highly recommend using.

1. Plan your topics

 

Although keywords are the brains of the operation when it comes to SEO, it isn’t the first thing that you should be analysing. We highly recommend creating a list of all the topics that you want to feature on your website that are relevant to the industry of your business and the nature of your work before you do anything else. If you are stuck you can always use SEO keyword tools to see what keywords are receiving the most searches and engagement and work your topics out from there.

If you are looking at keywords which you want to be found under, split them into two categories; short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. The difference between these is one is going to represent the general overview of the topic and what it is whereas the other is more grounded and specific which helps you get found under. Short-tailed keywords are mainly used as a support system to the long-tailed keywords as they receive a massive amount of searches which can become very competitive and therefore you should really only use them generously unlike long-tailed keywords still receive a significant volume of engagement but are much more manageable & realistic to compete with.

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2. branch out keywords

 

Now that you have decided on the topics that you want to feature on your site, you probably already have an idea of what keywords you want to be using. Ensure that the keywords that you choose are specific to that topic and are only being used on that specific page in order to prevent competition between your own content.

Using a variety of keywords opens your business to attract more traffic which still concentrates in your expert field but also creates diversity between your content and adheres to all kinds of searches that users are making which are relevant to you.

Therefore if you have 10 main topics that you want to cover across your whole website, each of these topics should be supported by their own set of keywords. This will eliminate the chance of your own content competing with each other on search engine result pages and also allows you to target more and different types of people.

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3. start building & optimiSe content

 

Now you are ready to start building your pages. Make sure that you really outline what each topic is about with great detail & with the addition of your long-tail keywords that you want to be found under.

Another tip when creating your pages is to add images, links and videos to not only make the page look attractive but to increase traffic and overall page time that users spend on it. In fact, you are 53 times more likely to be found on the first page of Google if you have a video embedded in your website (Jack&Charlie, May 2019). But also optimising media that you upload like images helps with the general speed of the website so less users leave due to waiting for content to show up.

Moreover, consistently filling out your Yoast SEO also helps with being found on Google. This is through choosing your own meta description, meta tags and what you want users to see when you appear on a search engine. Remember, the choices you make here need to be relevant to the content on that page or post. The more information and more relevant data you provide Google with, the more likely you are to rank higher.

 

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4. Get blogging

 

Google loves fresh and relevant content, in fact, we have written a more in-depth blog previously about using evergreen content on your website (click here to read it!). This type of content stays fresh for a very long time and often offers tips, advice and information which users search regularly. This doesn’t mean you need to be producing this type of content regularly, the idea is to stay active only our site and consistently update it with new content that is relevant to your industry – better yet it features some keywords which you want to be found under.

However, be careful with how many keywords you are using on these pages as Google has changed and now penalises websites that overuse certain keywords as it is considered “keyword stuffing“. There were instances a few years back when some website owners would format their text to blend in with the background of the site, essentially hiding them which would boost their ranking. However, as a result of this you need to be much more aware of the amount of keywords that you use.

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5. Track analytics

 

Analytics are the best way to track progress and performance of your website. Certain analytical tools, like Hot Jar, allow you to view the behaviour of your users and what they are doing on your web pages. The ocntent that you are creating and putting out there is for your audience which is why you need to ensure that you are meeting and exceeding their expectations in order to keep them coming back.

This data also allows you to really analyse your SEO and whether it is working or not. Compare the amount of clicks that each pages are receiving and see what keywords and included on each which will them tell you what keywords are working and which aren’t. As we are only touching on the on-site SEO aspect of optimisation, the traffic that you will come across on your analytics will group your off-site SEO too which can be from social media and other various platforms so it is important to distinguish between both.

 

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Are you ready for SEO

We can help! SEO (search engine optimisation) is complex and ever changing, but we like to make it as transparent and easy to understand as possible.

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