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In our third instalment of top tips Aled Nelmes is an SEO specialist and Founder of Lumen SEO. Aled works with companies across a diverse range of industries and he’s provided us with 5 top tips around optimising your website to become more visible on search engines.
Aled Nelmes is an SEO specialist and Founder of Lumen SEO — a digital marketing agency specialising in SEO. Aled works with companies across a diverse range of industries and he’s provided us with 5 top tips for optimising your website to become more visible on search engines.
Tip 1: Start A Blog
The first tip is to focus some time and energy on starting a blog. Ever since Google's BERT update in 2019, blogs have been at the forefront of Google's search pages.
When coming up with a blog title, make sure that you do your research and choose a title that answers a question in your industry, as the interest for these topics is already apparent.
Once you've come up with a title, when it comes to writing your blog, make sure that the keywords within your title are used throughout your blog in every single paragraph.
In addition to this, you will also want to remember to include a call to action at the end of every blog you write, as directs the people reading your blog to take the desired action. This could be as simple as directing your reader to other services that you provide or your other media channels.
Tip 2: Carry Out Keyword Research Before Writing Copy For Your Website
The next tip is to carry out keyword research before writing the copy for your website. Keyword research is an essential step to ranking highly in search, as it helps you to determine what people are looking for online and what search queries need answering.
There are many free resources you can use to carry out keyword research. I would recommend using Google Trends to find out related topics for the general keywords surrounding your product or service.
From here, you can start building separate lists for each landing page on your website and use those keywords throughout your copy to give it the best chance of being ranked highly on Google.
Tip 3: Optimise Your Metadata
One of the most important tips for improving your SEO is to always optimise your metadata. Despite being crucial to your SEO, you would be surprised by how many people forget to carry out this step.
In short, your metadata includes your title tag and your meta description. This is the little bit of title and text that you'll see when you make a Google search - there are usually 10 of them on the search results page.
When it comes to you optimising your metadata, you will need to make sure that you're using your title keywords in both the meta description and title tag.
In addition to this, be sure to remember to always include a call to action such as "Shop now", "Order online" or "Get a quote in minutes", like I mentioned earlier.
Tip 4: Optimise For Mobile Devices
Mobile usage for websites has seen significant growth in recent years, so make sure that your website looks good and functions well on mobile.
Make a point of editing the mobile version of your site separately to desktop and encourage people to use it and provide feedback on the user experience.
Failure to make your website mobile-friendly can be detrimental to SEO. The reason being is if your website doesn't work well on mobile, people will leave, which is bad for SEO.
As a result, then, Google will understand that your website doesn't suit mobile users and therefore won't show your website to mobile searches.
Bearing this in mind, making sure that your website is easy to use and looks good on mobile devices needs to be a priority.
Tip 5: Download & Install Google Search Console On Your Website
Lastly, an essential tip for improving your SEO strategy is to download and install Google Search Console on your website.
Google Search Console allows you to track the performance and keywords that people are using to find your website, as well as any big technical errors across mobile or desktop versions of your site.
Not only is it completely free and easy to use, but it also provides you with lots of information about how your website is performing online.
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