Digital Toolbox: marketing. Get noticed with smart SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a fundamental web marketing practice that every business with a website should be able to do well. To put it simply, SEO is the process of increasing a website’s visibility on search engine results pages, something that can greatly help you, especially if you’re new in the industry.

As the CEO of a large charity once told us: “If you’re not on the first page of Google, you don’t exist.” 

Simple steps to keep in mind are:

• Strategically choose the keywords you use in your website URL, titles, subtitles, images and videos and in your overall content.
• Make sure you’re using keywords that you want readers to associate with your organisation and find you with.
• Make sure you are location specific on where you are and where you operate.
• Keep your readers engaged as long as possible on the site through relevant, diverse and compelling content. The more time spent, pages visited and websites linking back to you, the higher the ranking.
• Most people browse from their mobile so make sure your website is mobile friendly. No flash, no bulky text, no unnecessary scrolling.

Once you’ve played around with optimizing your website you can use the following tools to have a better understanding of how you are doing and track your competitors.

Google Adwords is your entry portal to pay-per-click marketing, essentially having your website advertised in google search results. You can always create a short term pilot to see the effects it has on your business but don’t necessarily need to.

However, by creating a free AdWords account you can use Google’s powerful Keyword Planner tool which provides average monthly search volumes for keywords based in certain locations and defines the competitiveness of a keyword, while also providing you with an estimated suggested bid for how much a click would cost, should you want to advertise for it.

Google Webmasters is a Google search console that helps you to monitor your website’s presence in Google search results. More specifically:

a)    Search analytics - find the number of clicks, volume of impressions, click-through rate (%), position that your website ranks for certain keywords and phrases in the previous 90 days.

b)    Content keywords - this report identifies the search terms most frequently used to find your site. Check this from time to time to see if correlates with your business’ goods or services.

c)    Link analysis - find out which websites are linking to yours, the anchor text used, and which pages are getting the most traffic from external links. It's a must do for good SEO practice.

Semrush or Spyfu help to analyse your competitors' website traffic, get a sense of your competitors' keyword strategy and hopefully will help you find and dominate your niche in search rankings. Most digital marketers have indicated that Semrush is one of the best SEO and competition analysis tool out there, but you’ll tend to get more value for free on SpyFu.

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Photo credit: Pixabay