Do you wish you appeared higher on Google? Here’s 5 ways to rise the ranks… 

Whatever type of industry you are in, having an online presence for your business is key. Yet, knowing how to ensure its successful, takes a lot of different factors to work.  

Having a company website is a great place to start, but to make sure you are consistently appearing high enough on Google search results to attract customers, you need to ensure your web pages are written with SEO in mind. 

We know SEO can feel daunting, so if you are someone that’s new to writing online content for business – we are sharing some simple tips to follow, that when applied can make a real difference to where your business could rank with Google.  

Before we begin though, let’s have a brief refresh on what Search Engine optimisation actually is.  

The SEO experts MOZ sum it up simply: 

“SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content, a good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.” 

SEO is a complex subject matter with a multitude of elements needed to maximise the optimisation of a website. One that would certainly take more than one blog post or top tips run down to achieve – instead what we are talking through today is tips for beginners. Changes you can start implementing today that collectively will increase your chances of being seen.  

Start by applying each of these five tips whenever you are writing a new post or page for your website. 

1. Add the key word you are targeting in your URL 

Let’s start at the beginning with your webpage title. Not only does this need to be enticing enough to attract readers, but it also needs to contain the keyword you are talking about. Clever headlines are all well and good on a newspaper or social media heading, but if a webpage/post title doesn’t contain the subject you are talking about (and what people are typing into Google) you are making it harder for yourself to appear in search engine results. 

2. Don’t be too brief 

There’s a lot of confusion around how long web pages should be and the ideal word count, especially as web pages can serve so many different functions. In fact, there are many, many articles and debates online solely about this topic and optimum amount search engines like. Google weighed in on the argument a couple of years ago and actually went as far as saying that there is no magic number and quality is far more important than quality.  Yet as the years have gone on, popular opinion is, the longer the better when it comes to creating organic content for your website that’s going to help you rank. We would say a good length to aim for with a blog post is at least 600 words (and if it ends up being longer great) and have 350 words as a minimum on any text blog post.

3. Always include images 

We all know the phrase an image says a thousand words and its more relevant than ever with online content. We are so used to consuming visually appealing digital content, that we now expect most things to be broken up with imagery. Plus, did you know that if you label your images this helps with SEO? The easiest way to do this, is create a naming convention for all your images, describing what they are and what copy they relate to and add this in the ALT tag for each one.  By doing this, you will be organically enriching the SEO of your page. Just don’t be tempted to keyword stuff.  It’s also important to check the sizing of your images, if they are too big, resize before adding to your post so they don’t slow your site down.  

4. Add a meta description 

A meta description is the copy that is pulled though into the Google search page results when that web page comes up in a search.  

Put simply, this is the two lines underneath the web address that is going to explain to searchers what this page is about and most importantly determine whether they click – so make sure those 160 characters are working for you to entice more click throughs. Every time you finish writing a post or page for your website, its then key you spend some time writing a strong meta description to go along with it. This should include a summary of what the post is about and what the reader will gain from reading it. Also try to incorporate within this a CTA – this is a call to action for the reader and in this case the action is clicking to read your article.  

5. Use headings 

t’s always good practice with written content to break up big bodies of text and there are a choice of different subheadings options you can use when writing on a website. These are your heading options and range from H1 to H6. H1 is your title heading so should only be used once as your main heading. The others can then be used as subheadings to break up and organise the rest of your copy.  

You can use a mix, starting with H2 as main subheadings and then a mix of the rest if these are then needed to further divide and break up the rest of the text. Alongside your text and images, these will be scanned by search engines when crawling your website, to determine what your content is about. So why not give them a helping hand by including the main topics and keywords in these headings. It works similarly to how chapters break up a book – these headings give pointers to search engines such as Google, that could mean you end up higher on the list when talking about a particular topic  

These are some pointers to get you started, but when it comes to a full SEO package, each website and business needs to be looked at individually.   

At WP Creative we have a dedicated SEO service, creating tailored SEO strategies to build up the authority of induvial business websites.  You can find all about it over on our SEO Services page, or get in touch today to discuss our marketing packages.