5 Steps to optimise your website SEO For what people are looking for

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been emailed or cold called by a “SEO Expert” who promises to make you number 1 on Google. Keep your hands up if you’ve read countless articles about Website SEO (Search Engine Optimisation if you’re wondering) and why it is so important for your business, but you have still to this day not understood a word of it or have not made any inroads into achieving that number 1 spot.

Related: What Is My Website SEO Score?

It’s easy to be confused or even scared by SEO jargon, the vast amount of tools, platforms and scammers making it sound really difficult and near impossible to get to grips with – all the while trying to run your business and keep your head above water! But it really shouldn’t be like that. SEO is really just about finding out what people want, then giving it to them!

The good news is that with the right guidance and tools at your disposal, you could very quickly start to improve your ranking for your desired keyword (s) – without the need to hire those scammers pretending to rank you number 1 on Google!

Download the free A Guide to SEO Best Practices for Small Business eBook, and we’ll walk you through how to start improving your site for SEO. At the same time we’ve found this awesome video made by Infusionsoft featuring Cyrus Shephard who is the director of audience development at Moz, where he oversees content marketing and leads SEO initiatives.

In this video, Cyrus talks about:

• SEO tools
• Why to optimize for themes people are looking for instead of just keywords
• How to build your website around what people are looking for
• What the heck human-based signals are and why they’re important

5 steps to optimise your website SEO according to Cyrus:

1.Figure out what people are looking for first

Before you dive into SEO optimisation, you first need to find out what your target market are actually looking for. Just like a sales assistant would (should) ask what you were looking for first before suggesting any item or range to look at, so should you when starting to optimise your website.

You want to step in front of your audience right at the moment they’re ready to buy. To help you achieve this use tools such as Google Adwords Planner, Bing Keyword Research Tool or Keyword Tool IO.

2. Optimise your website for what people are looking for – not what you want to sell

People do the same type of searches over and over and they do them within the same themes. Instead of optimising your website for what you want to sell, you want to make sure it is optimised for what people are looking for. Just make sure you incorporate those keywords and especially those themes into your pages.

But remember keywords are not as important as they once were as search engines are now much smarter at figuring out the topics of keywords. Keywords can be the starting point from which to build content around so you match the user intent to what you are selling and aligning those two things together

Once you know what people are looking for you can simply look at your own website and simply say “Does this match up?”

3. Make your website search engine friendly

You have your keywords, you know what your target audience are looking for so you build your website around that you want to make sure search engines can crawl and index your website.

Use tools such as Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, MOZ or our own SEO tool at https://www.inversionmarketing.co.za/what-is-my-website-seo-score/ which will crawl your website and let you know of any errors they may find on your website and make suggestions to make sure your site is search engine friendly.

4. Make your website enticing to users on search results

In the early days of SEO website owners thought of the practice as tricking people into visiting their websites, and as a result many would tune out when it came to optimising their website for search engines as it seemed like they were manipulating their website and their potential customers. However search engines are now getting really smart about looking at how your users are interacting with your website.

One of the most important things you can now do is trying to get users to pick you on search results alone. If you can get the user to pick you over someone else after they typed in a search that is a good signal to the search engines that your website should possibly deserve a higher ranking. Thus the more clicks you get you not only get more traffic you’re ensuring your site is getting a better ranking.

So how do you get noticed on Search Results:

There are ways you can manipulate how your website looks to search engines making your website more enticing for users to click on your site over your competitors. Remember it is not the old school manipulation of a website by keyword stuffing, it is rather manipulative in the sense that you’re giving the user what they want – which in effect is giving everyone what they want.

Thus on search results you would want to:

1. Improve the title of your website that appears to users
2. Improve the url of your website by using the relevant keywords
3. Improve your website/page description so users know what it is about immediately

5. Keep the users engaged on your website

Once you’ve done your research on what users are looking for and optimised your website around those topics and themes, made it search engine friendly and enticed users to click on your links over you competitors, you still have one last major hurdle to overcome.

Search engines are now actively looking for users that visit your site and then go back to the search page immediately after. This activity will negatively affect your ranking as your website may have not satisfied the users because of your poor or irrelevant content or structure.

Thus once you have earned the click you need to make sure they stay on so that they can do the thing that they came to your site to do. So if they visited the site to buy red shoes for example, they can actually buy red shoes on your website and not go back to the search engine and look for something else or use one of your competitors instead.

Website SEO isn’t that scary now is it?

Now that you have a better understanding of your website’s SEO you should be more confident in taking actionable steps towards improving your site’s ranking and more importantly your business’s bottom line!

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