As you’ll probably already know, the online marketing world never stands still. With so much change, how do you keep up to date with it all, particularly given it’s not your day job? That last point is an important one; as a digital agency we’re fortunate to work with a lot of clients across a lot of sectors, and that in turn gives us a great understanding of how things are developing. With that in mind, here’s an update on five simple things we find are really helping our client’s search engine rankings at the moment…

Page Title

This is still one of the most important ranking factors for a website. As an average user you’ll probably know the ‘page title’ as the words that appear in the tab of your browser when you’re on any page of a website. They give Google an idea of what the page is about, and therefore what that page should be ranking for.

What’s working in this area is knowing what it is you want to be ranking for (keep this to a maximum of three or four central key phrases) and making sure all (yes that’s all) of your page titles are geared toward this.

Unfortunately, you can’t rank for everything, so it’s time to put your online eggs in a few carefully selected baskets. These baskets should be where there’s search volume (use Google Adwords keyword planner to check) and where you can realistically rank highly – aspirations of ranking above Amazon as an online store should be shelved as an example here!

Your page titles should then take on the same structure on each page:

Insert name of page – Insert key Phrase.

About Us – Web Design Cornwall, Devon

This builds a picture for Google and also ensures they’re different on all pages.

We’ve found that through simple changes to page titles sites can see a marked increase in current ranking positions.

Speed of site

Google wants sites to be quick as it doesn’t want to be driving traffic to those that require a visitor to make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the home page to load. With that in mind the slower you are, the lower you could rank.

But what exactly is slow and what is quick?
This is often a hard one for any user to decipher and it’s become increasingly difficult since a growing number of areas in the South West have gained Superfast Broadband; everything seems quick!

Take objectivity out of it by using Google’s own tool:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Take a look at your score and see if there’s anything that can be remedied; hosting is often the quickest and easiest thing to improve if you’re looking to increase the speed of a site.

Links

So I mentioned them earlier on and they’re actually still pretty important (despite all the hype over content, which of course is also crucial!). Google sees a link from other websites as a vote of confidence for your own, so it’s worth having those links and votes.

Links can be found from a large range of sources, but a quick and easy win for smaller businesses would be to look to online business directories that also allow you to include a link to your website. They’re worth the one or two sales calls you might get as a result; just swat those away!

The basics

What do I mean by the basics? Well I guess I mean a multitude of things really; having a working sitemap (xml not just a page with all of your pages in a long list on it), referencing that in your robots.txt file (speak to your web developer, it’s a 2 minute job), having plenty of content on your site that’s relevant (don’t worry about key word density; if you’re writing about a topic you’re likely to use the right words) and ensuring that you’re adding that content regularly (at least twice a month) to a blog section, which is going to potentially increase the number of key phrases you rank for.

Our SEO Audit

Final thing that’s been working is our own SEO Audit and Roadmap! No real sales plug here, but what we do is take a look at your site and where it should be ranking, before helping it get there through onsite and offsite factors. We provide that all in a document for you, and from there you’ll know exactly what you need to do going forward. Extremely cost effective and results driven.

We’ve helped a number of businesses recently and two of them have gained more than 100 places within the first two months!

It’s £250 + VAT so if you’d like to know more give us a call on 01566 232323 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk and we’ll explain a bit more.