With the mythical search engine algorithm for Google still baffling marketers left, right and centre, and Google’s new penalisation for over-optimised sites, SEO is something that leaves people stumped and often a little irritated. But what can you do to get your site ranking higher in Google, Bing and Yahoo to help attract more clients and generate more sales? With a little help from Xposure, that’s how!

Step 1

You need to know your audience, your niche area, and write content on your site that is extremely useful for them. If your post is engaging enough and gives away relevant tips and information to your target audience, it will be linked to again and again thus dragging your site up the search engine results.

Step 2

Keep your content up to date. As industries are forever changing (no matter what you specialise in) it is essential that you go back and amend articles and posts you may have written months or years ago in order to ensure that you lower bounce rates and rank higher. Given that search engines use semantic searches more commonly than ever before, your content needs to be up to date to be seen. Make sure that the user experience is good for those visiting your site, otherwise all your SEO work will be in vain when people can’t bare to spend any time on your pages.

Step 3

Make sure that your content is very readable. The more people that can read your content and understand it, will equal more social shares (which are excellent for your ranking in search results!). If your content is good, then it is more likely it will be shared, which will spread the word about your company to interested and relevant audiences.

Step 4

Using the right keywords is very important to get you ranking high in search results. Your keywords are the terms that people use when they talk about your business or industry. Far from littering your page with words that you want people to say, make sure that you use them effectively, keeping your text readable but also searchable. (Add your keywords to H1 tags, H2 tags, H3 tags, Alt tags on images and to the URLs as these all dramatically affect search engine results- if this seems like another language to you, drop us a line).

Step 5

Why not go really niche with your audience? The more targeted your content is, the more likely it is to attract a very specific audience. Whether you want SME garden centres, or boarding kennels for poodles, if you have an audience in your mind when you write, then you will be able to target your writing more and get a positive response. For your specific keywords, you will come top, and then interested audiences will share your work, spreading your reach even further. This will also result in a smaller bounce rate, as you know your audience want to read what you have written.

Step 6

SEO is of course about more than just quality content. It has to be the right content and it has to work. Your site must be built for users and should be easy to use and navigate as well as packed to the rafters with excellent content. Think about your bounce rate! If users don’t like what they find on your site, or can’t find what they like, then they will leave quickly, pushing you down the results!

Step 7

Make every page a landing page. You may not have thought about your site like this, but each page you have can technically be the first ever page a user sees of your site and is consequently a landing page. Google indexes pages individually so it is essential that every page of your site is perfectly written and presented to give the right first impression to everyone, every time.

Step 8

Have a go at blogging. This can be a great way to get some of your more obscure keywords onto your site, as you can pretty much blog about whatever you like (keep it clean though!). Have your blog as part of your site, preferably under the same domain name, and then get writing about topics and issues your audience want to hear about, in an excellent manner and using all your relevant keywords.

Step 9

Don’t forget your social networks. This links directly to your blogging, as it should be second nature to share your content with your social networks. As Twitter and Facebook are very well trusted sites, and also arenas with millions of people logging on everyday, putting your content on to them can only be a good thing! It can encourage ‘retweets’ or shares, which all go greatly towards your over all search engine result.

We have been working with clients around Mansfield and the country to assist them with SEO for a number of years now and have got our newest client ‘Conestoga Rovers and Associates‘ up in the top three for their keywords ‘GHG Verification’ in the world!