As an online business, driving traffic and sales through your website should be your number one priority. However, knowing what tactics you should be using to optimise the performance of your company site can sometimes prove a difficult task. With so many different strategies available, how do you find the ones that are proven to work?
SEO is changing all the time, and keeping up with the latest developments in the search world can be exhausting. That’s why we’re writing this very article to let you in on the top SEO tasks that you can start working on right now to improve your rankings, sales, and overall website performance!
Use high resolution images
The images you show of your product are important, they can either influence users to buy or deter them. Make sure to never use stock photos and ensure the images you use are representative of the product you’re selling. Ensure your images are well lit, good quality and show different angles of the product so that customers are 100% sure of what they are paying for.
Spend time on your sales copy
Potential customers aren’t solely basing their decision to buy your product on the images, the copy you write to go alongside your products is crucial. Your sales copy should include the details you would want to know before purchasing, such as sizing, features and benefits. Ensure your copy is clear and concise as well as being honest, making false claims will only damage your credibility.
Optimise for search
Whilst working on your sales copy, make sure that you’re optimising your content and website as a whole for SEO. By including keywords your customers are searching for within your content, this shows search engines that you are relevant to show for them searches. Use keywords sparingly and only when they make sense to do so, so that your content reads well and doesn’t come across spammy.
Focus your landing pages
If a potential customer has made it to a product page, the only action you want them to take at this point is to purchase. Remove any distractions or deterring call to actions that may take the user away from completing a purchase. Downloads and newsletter sign ups have no place on a product page, unless the download contains product specs and provides supporting content.
Make buying easy
Accepting debit and credit cards may not always be enough. Customers often want to check out as fast as possible, so consider offering additional options such as PayPal, ApplePay and Google Wallet. This may require you to have a more sophisticated checkout process, but doing so will be worth having the increased functionality for customers.
Improve Page Speed
We all knew it was coming; a slow landing page is never a good page. Google has recently announced that mobile page speed is set to become a ranking factor from July 2018, so now is a better time than any to sort your website out before this change comes into play.
Not only is the load time of your website on mobile devices going to impact how Google will now rank your website in the search results, slow load time also kills your user experience and drives potential customers right on over to your competitors where their website loads in less than three seconds.
Head on over to Google PageSpeed Insights and get tips from Google themselves on how they recommend you improve your website to follow their guidelines.
Google has always recommended a site load time, on desktop and mobile, that is below 2-3 seconds. Use this as your goal!
Go mobile
People shop on the go on their mobile for all types of products, inexpensive and investment items. Ensure your website is mobile optimised and all features work correctly so that you aren’t losing customers due to poor experience.
Make the most of Google Ads
If you sell products or services online, it’s likely you are running Google Ads. You may have great ad text, but make sure that you’re utilising all the relevant ad extensions to expand your ad and provide more information to potential customers. Not only will ad extensions increase the CTR of your ads, it will make your ad stand out from your competitors.
Showcase your testimonials
The best vote of confidence for your brand is testimonials and case studies from real customers, it is general practice nowadays for users to look up reviews of your business before purchasing. If you have had positive feedback on a product or service you provide, showcase these on your homepage and product pages.
Write about subjects that your audience is interested in
If your blog is producing and publishing articles on topics that users are rarely searching for, your chances of increasing the amount of traffic that you blog is seeing are slim to none. It can be tempting to write about the subjects that are of interest to you, whether it be latest industry news or a recent trend, but this kind of content has a typically short shelf life. To resolve this potential issue, content writers should ensure that they are producing articles surrounding topics that users are seen to be searching for and ones in which they themselves are passionate about. This should be the foundation of your approach regarding your copywriting strategies; every post published should be aimed toward a term that holds search traffic potential and you should produce engaging content.
The easiest way to do this is to begin by typing any relevant phrase or keyword into Google and looking through all of the suggested ideas that you are provided with; these are all of the relevant terms that other users have been searching for.
Share your content to your social channels
Sharing the content that you create with your followers on your business’ social profiles provides companies with a great way to market their knowledge and services to the users. Indeed, these users are most likely to be interested in the content. Business focused social media platforms such as LinkedIn hold the ability to act as great channels for organic traffic, helping businesses to see an increase in users frequenting their website as a result.
Give Video A Go
We’re not suggesting you become the next big ‘vlogger’ or start live streaming your coffee breaks, but video can be an amazing drive force in your digital marketing efforts in two ways.
Firstly, having video content keeps users on your website for longer which Google sees a positive user experience which naturally will have a positive impact on rankings without you having to make a massive change to your website. Simply embed a video that showcases the best your business has to offer and let it do the work for you.
Secondly, YouTube is often referred to as the second largest search engine in the World. Circulating your videos on this platform will open you up to a much larger audience via YouTube’s search result pages.
Putting yourself out there on video can be daunting, but it really does work. It can be as formal or as informal as you like, whichever fits your brand the best.
Change Up Your Link Building
If you’ve been link building for a long time, I bet you’ve been using the same templated outreach email for at least the past 6 months…or more. Don’t get us wrong, you may have the most amazing outreach email that turns any opportunity into a link every time – but this is unlikely.
Link building outreach is difficult; outreach emails have become like cold calling in the sense that as soon as you open them you delete straight away. If a large percentage of emails you are sending out are not receiving responses, it’s time to switch up your tactics.
The best way to connect with people is just that, to be a person – not an automated email. Create a personal brand that people want to connect with, use intrigue and humour to increase your chances of getting a response. Be present on key social media networks and actually populate your profile with content that you have made and topics you actually have knowledge about.
Do you want your business to succeed online but nothing seems to be working? Get in touch and we can put together and implement a full digital marketing strategy for you, taking all the hard work out of your hands and giving you great results!