Your customers are searching for you online – but can they find you? Follow these five SEO tips from Syed, the Head of Search here at iThinkMedia, to make a few changes that will dramatically improve your visibility online.
1. Thinking like your customers is not enough
The way you plan to look after customers’ interests and their needs on your website is going to make you rank higher in search engine results pages. Whether you are a local or an international business, like other marketing channels, your search strategy should start with your customers at the centre of everything. Get some keyword research done to find out exactly what your potential customers are searching for and make sure they can find what they need on your website.
2. Don’t go for the volume
When you’ve identified which keywords you want to target, remember that you don’t have to catch them all. The biggest challenge for marketers is to decipher searchers’ intent when they are looking for a product or a service through a search engine. This becomes even more complicated if your business operates in both B2B and B2C markets or just B2B. For example, if you are an industrial flooring company, there are more searches for ‘kitchen flooring’ but as a B2B business how do you know if the searcher is an architect or a homeowner?
Showing up in someone’s search results who wants a tiny apartment floor is no good if you want to land big commercial clients. In this instance, it might be better to go after phrases with clear intent such as ‘commercial kitchen flooring’, ‘restaurant kitchen flooring’. This will allow you to cut through the noise and attract highly relevant traffic.
3. Is your website fit for a modern consumer?
Search giants have been busy shifting their focus on user experience in last few years. I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure your website is technically sound. Search engines love websites that are fast and make it easy for people to find the information they are looking for and reward them with higher search rankings. According to Google, 40% of consumers will leave your website if it doesn’t load within three seconds and a large percentage of people won’t come back. A good starting point will be to start exploring page speed insights for your website.
4. Get ready for voice search
Dialogue-based information retrieval is quickly becoming more common. According to Comscore, 50% of the searches will be made by voice by 2020. With Google home, Amazon’s Echo and other voice assistants, search engines have already made significant advancements in this area.
In fact, Google has recently published a set of guidelines to help businesses optimise their sites for voice. It’s still early days for voice search optimisation, however, focusing your efforts on this, along with longer search terms, will help future-proof your website.
5. Mobile-first index
Google is going to slowly roll-out mobile-first index which means that sites will be ranked and indexed based on how optimised they are for mobile.
If you are a local business, it’s extremely important to start with targeting customers in the areas you provide your services in. Having a responsive and mobile friendly site will ensure your business stays in the index for people who are searching for you on-the-go. Get in touch to discover how we can help your
SEO efforts. Or, Tweet us at
@Honcho_Search with your thoughts on our tips!