SEO: 5 Tips to boost your business’ search rankings

SEO (search engine optimisation) is a term that frightens many people - especially business owners who have enough things to focus on other than learning the ins and outs of digital marketing.

However, because the average consumer turns to Google first when looking for a solution or product, strong search engine rankings are super important for success and should not be neglected. If your business does not appear on the first page, you might be missing out on valuable opportunities. In fact, studies shows that 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines. So, as a business owner, if SEO doesn’t concern you, then it probably should!

Boosting your SEO doesn’t happen overnight, and the prospect of figuring out the best ways to do it can be overwhelming - especially when you have digital experts telling you to strip your website apart and rambling on about terms like “robots.txt files” and “link building” that make no sense to you.

Before you have a panic attack, what you need to remember is that if you have great solution to offer, then search engines like Google want people to find your website. For this reason, they have made it easier than you think. In this article, we provide some straightforward tips on how to boost your search rankings.

1. Have a strong performing website

This one might seem obvious to most people, but what constitutes a “strong performing” site?

• Site speed: it is important to check the speed of your website across mobile and desktop and make sure it is not slower than it should be. According to Intergrowth, bounce rates increase by 103% if your website takes 2 seconds extra to load! There are many free tools to help you check your website's performance, but Google even has their own one. You can enhance your site speed through methods such as optimising your images, reducing the number of JavaScript files, and avoiding using too many plugins.

• Site user journey: Search engines can pick up when your website has a poor user journey, and they will penalise you for this. Go back to the basics and put yourself in your target audience’s shoes when viewing your website. This might make you realise that the flow of your website could be improved. Also, use website analytics, like Google analytics, to do research into how long people are spending on your site, which pages have higher bounce rates, and what is driving conversions. These insights will help you to enhance your site for a better user journey.

2. Be clever with your keyword choices

If you are selling bananas to supermarkets and you think that targeting the keyword “bananas” is the best strategy, you may actually be very wrong!

There are various tools that can help you get keyword ideas, but you can also do your own searches to figure out the types of websites that are coming up for different phrases. Changing your messaging to incorporate keywords and phrases like “bulk fruit purchases” or “fruit suppliers for supermarkets”, which your potential customers may be searching for, can go a long way to boosting your rankings.

You can also use tools like Google Search Console to help you identify what keywords people are using to find your website. Try to look out for commonly searched keywords that competitors haven’t targeted yet. Often, they haven’t thought about a certain keyword, or they feel it doesn’t fit in their niche or strategy, and this can provide a neat gap for you to tap into.

3. Post good quality content

Why do you think we spend so much time writing articles like these? Obviously, other than trying to help you? ;)

Good quality content is one of the key pillars in boosting your search engine rankings. But don’t just post an article about your pet goat and how she showed you the meaning to life (unless you are selling something related to that). Think about what your potential customers are looking for, and post content that provides value to them.

At LUNIR we use advanced social listening technology to dive even further into consumer behaviour and identify what people are looking for. Get in touch here if you want to find out more about this.

4. Remember the power of page titles

One of the first things that search engines use to assess your web page content is the page titles. Make sure you have strong H1 titles (heading 1 titles) that describe what that page is about. An H1 title is the header title for your page (make sure that you only have one H1 title per page).

Let’s take the banana example again. If the title on your homepage is “The Best Yellow Fruit”, it may boost the reputation of bananas, but it isn’t really describing what you are offering. On the other hand, if your heading is “The Top Banana Distributer in Europe”, that would probably be more effective and result in higher rankings.

5. Write effective meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the page descriptions that you add on the backend of your website to describe the content of your pages in more detail. They appear below the title on search engine results, as shown below:

Make sure to have polished and captivating meta descriptions for each of your pages. This will not only improve your search engine rankings, but it will also boost the number of people clicking on the search result for your website.

Also make sure that you don’t duplicate these descriptions across your different pages - they should each be unique.

Implementing just a few of these tips can boost your SEO and help your business get the attention it deserves. If you are looking to take your SEO a step further by looking at the more technical aspects, then feel free to get in touch here.