5 Quick & Easy On-Page SEO Tips to Jumpstart Your 2022
According to HubSpots 2021 State of Marketing Report, your website is still the #2 most important channel used in marketing, next to social media. In fact, according to Google, 28% of “nearby” or “near me” searches end up in a purchase, while 88% of mobile searchers who search for a store on Google Maps visited a related store within a week.
This makes search engine optimisation a must-have for any business, big or small!
However, the problem that most business owners face is that they lack either the time, money, or expertise to conduct proper SEO practices.
Being as though we’re in the business of helping small businesses with their digital marketing, however, we’ve put together 5 quick and easy on-page SEO steps that almost anyone can do with their website to help improve their SEO.
Keyword research is at the heart of good SEO implementation. Start off with using Google Keyword Planner to help you find the right keywords that your audience is searching.
Question keywords are often the most ideal types of keywords for any business. Search intent is also another factor that you have to take into consideration when choosing your keywords.
Is the user typing in a particular keyword in order to answer a question they have, conduct research, or make a purchase? Think of how a keyword would be used by a potential visitor, and use the ones most-suited for your marketing goals and objectives.
After you’ve decided on your keywords, optimise your content so that the keyword populates the page or post. Whatever you do, however, don’t overpopulate your page with your keyword. Keyword stuffing is a practice that Google frowns upon. So as much as possible, make sure that your content still sounds natural and is easy to read.
The rest of our quick tips are recommendations on where it’s best to include your keyword.
The title of your page or post should contain your keyword. Preferably, the earlier the keyword appears in your title, the better.
Keywords in your headings are also a great place to insert your keyword. Google pays special attention to these headings for keywords because it uses them to get an overview of the general theme of your page or website.
Make sure your headings are structured well, with main topics occupying the H1 and H2 tags, and subtopics in the H3 to H6 tags.
The page URL is considered the unique address of your content on the internet. Make sure that the URL contains your main keyword. This is for the benefit of both Google and your audience, as a URL with your keyword will also make it easier for a visitor to remember and relocate your page should they decide to come back at a later date.
If your business sells leather shoes for men, for example, you want your page’s URL to look something like this: www.leathershoes.com/mens-leather-shoes-brisbane
Internal links are links that point to other posts or pages on your website. Often these are used to point to related or additional content and information that you have stored in other locations on your website.
Preferably, you want to only link to articles that you want to rank on search engines. Internal links can help boost the traffic on these links and lower your site’s bounce rate.
External links, on the other hand, are links that point to sources outside of your website. One reason to do this is to help create authority for your articles. If you can reference other sources with information, statistics, or case studies related to your product, industry, or business, that should help you build authority with your readers.
Another reason it’s important to insert external links is so that you also have the potential to gain backlinks to your own website. If the owner of the website you linked to is getting a lot of traffic coming from your site, they might just reward you with a backlink of their own, giving you both a mutual advantage.
Did you know that blogs with images receive 94% more views than blogs without them? Back in 2018, Google Images made up 22.6% of all internet searches. And, based on current trends in technology, it’s predicted that this 2022 more than 50% of search engine use will include a voice or image search.
So how do you optimise your videos and images for search engines?
First off, before you upload images and videos onto your website, though, make sure that you optimise the filenames beforehand, especially if you’re uploading images of your products. An image with the filename “running-shoes-for-men.jpg” for example, is much more optimised for search than one with the filename “website_shoe_image_001.jpg”
Additionally, once you’ve uploaded your files onto your website, and have inserted them into your post or page, optimise the description and the “Alt-text” of your media.
The alt-text or alt tag is a tag that appears should your image or video not load properly on your website. It’s also another element that search engines inspect for Google Image rankings.
After you’ve gone through these five quick & easy on-page SEO steps for your main blog content, you should be able to rest easy knowing that you’ve done what you could for the meantime to make sure that your website is well-optimised for search engines.
SEO, however, is a long-term process and strategy. And it often requires new and updated content for it to be truly effective. If you’re pressed for time, however, you can always contact one of our agents to discuss how we can best help you jumpstart your 2022 with search engine optimised content.