Lesser Known SEO Tips That Any Business Can Benefit From
Most digital marketers and business owners should be familiar by now with the major do’s and don’ts of search engine optimisation (SEO), such as ensuring relevant keywords are mentioned often throughout your site, updating content regularly and ensuring it is relevant, and utilising social media platforms effectively. But there are a tonne of lesser known, highly actionable tactics that can have a profound impact on a website’s SEO ranking – and that don’t require the support of dedicated SEO services. Here are just a few of those actions:
Remove anything that slows down your site
Google uses a set of defined page speed criteria to base SEO rankings on, and it utilities some pretty hardcore software to instantaneously audit the quality and speed of a webpage before deciding how high it will be ranked in the search results. A faster loading page will outrank a slower loading page, so it is worth auditing your website and optomising it for quicker loading, which involves minimising high-resolution images, getting rid of unnecessary plugins and utilising next-gen image formats. It is recommended that site speed be kept to 2-3 seconds, so work closely with a developer to identify where any page speed issues lie.
Mention your business contact details on EVERY PAGE
Especially if you are a business targeting local consumers, adding a physical address and contact details to the footer of every page is a simple but effective tactic to improving SEO. This is because it reinforces your physical location to Google, and it deems your site “trustworthy”, pushing you up a little in the rankings as a result.
Minimize repetitive boilerplate text
This is quite tricky for businesses to nail because it is difficult to draw the line between including targeted keywords across every page and plastering the same content across the entire site. If you include the exact same “boilerplate text” on too many pages of your site and have very little unique content, Google flags that content as potentially “invaluable” and does not recommend it to audiences.
Get rid of “low quality” or harmful backlinks
It is common knowledge that linking key terms to reputable websites, such as New York Times of Forbes, is a powerful way of improving the SEO ranking of a website. At the same time, spamming a website with irrelevant or low-quality links can have the opposite impact on SEO. Any low-quality or suspicious links should be permanently removed from your website, and this may involve asking the webmaster to remove those links.
Include visually awesome, shareable content across your site
You know how every time you look for a food image on Google and it reveals a picture that was shared by someone on Instagram but originally published on a website? Or when you search for a beautiful data visualisation and it brings you to the source of the visualisation: an article written by a small-time blogger? These are examples of how powerful and effective a great image or infographic can be for a site’s or story’s SEO success. Be it a data-driven map, an industry-specific resource page, and infographic or another kind of interactive content, if you create something that is visually awesome and highly likely to be shared by your audience, then your page will spread like wildfire and so too will your SEO ranking increase.
