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Perhaps you are a sole proprietor or a small business owner that have a simple website presence. It’s possible to do your own SEO at little or no cost and it can make a big difference to your online organic traffic. There are plenty of free website services available, the most popular being Wix, Weebly and Google where you can create a website quickly for no cost. These are great when you are starting out and will give you an immediate online presence. But how do you generate leads and get ranked on search engines without paying someone to do it for you?
If you are prepared to invest a little time and effort yourself there are some basic steps you can take to maximise your organic search and that means relevant traffic to your website without spending money on advertising. Use your own URL. Getting a URL for your site is a service that many companies offer, some at greatly inflated prices or they suffix their own domain with your business name. Choose a name that reflects your business, if you are a locksmith in London for example try something like www.locksmithsoflondon.com. Use a .com and get the URL to describe what you offer and where. This example is a little long so ideally come up with something shorter. Try www.godaddy.com to purchase your domain name, it’s inexpensive and they have easy to use guides that walk you through anything remotely technical. Backlinks. Create quality backlinks to your site. An SEO agency will often create many backlinks for your site and charge you for the pleasure. However, it’s not as simple as that, backlinks to your site should be of a high quality from a reputable source website. If your business is listed in Yelp for example you can link the recommendations and testimonials back to your site and the search engine recognises this as a link from a reputable site. Google My Business. Get your business listed on Google My Business, it’s free and just takes just a few minutes to set up. You will have to verify your business address and once completed your business starts to show up on Google Maps and in Google Search straightaway. Social Media Channels. Create accounts for your business in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pintrest. This give you the opportunity to link your business across all channels. These are great for updating your customers new and old with news about your products and services along with any special offers and promotions. If you have a physical product then using Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok can be great for showcasing pictures and videos too. Technical Issues. It is not common but it does happen that your website provider has not picked up on technical errors on your site. There may be issues with incorrect header tags and descriptions or JavaScript errors in the site code. These are easily remedied and your website providers should be able to guide you through this. Also check that your site SSL encryption is up to date, this is the ‘s’ in the https:// that indicate to the site visitor that your site is secure. Content. If you have time try and create and post content as frequently as you can, daily is great but everyone is busy so try and do at least one piece a week. Understand your relevant keywords and use appropriately in all your content. Post your content on your website (it should be straightforward to create a blog page within your menu and is certainly possible with Wix and Weebly) and add to all your social media channels too. For extra coverage you can create an account on Reddit and post your content in relevant forums. Benchmark and monitor Of course, it’s crucial to understand the impact of all your work on your organic search over a period of time. Its easy to scan and understand the current status of your website by using a tool like Diib and you can then monitor over time to check you are making progress. If you are not sure how to go about implementing any of the tips above or just don’t have the time to do this yourself it’s easy to reach out to RDM (Robertson Digital Marketing) in London and they can get you started straightaway.
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To understand how your website is performing and identify missed revenue generating opportunities you can get great insights from a bunch of free to use utilities. Most are really easy to use and set up and can help identity potential actions. Others require a certain level of technical understanding. Probably the most used website utility tools are those offered by Google, they have a whole range of services that are free to use. At a minimum you should at least have a web analytics account as this link to many of the other Google services you may want to use. Using all Google tools require a certain level of technical understanding but their online help and guides are reasonably good.
Other useful tools Have a look at some other website audit tools out there that offer an element of free information, Observe Point, Heap and Diib are some of the most widely used. The first is aimed at enterprise level companies so you may get an initial audit free but you could face being qualified by their sales team first, suffice to say they are not interested in small businesses, that’s where the second two fit. For this reason, we recommend Diib because it is just so easy to get started. Just supply your website URL and email address and they instantly scan your website putting stacks of useful information and data into an easy to understand dashboard. You can further enhance this by supplying your website Google UA code and giving permission for enhanced scanning. Best of all you can keep access to your dashboard forever and they update it with a scan every week. If you do want some more useful information of course they will change you but the fees are very low and only a fraction of the cost of other website audit software. There are always new players coming onto the market so it can pay to keep abreast of new developments and try other platforms to compare. Of course, make sure you act on the data you get, correct any errors identified and check out any suggestions made to see if you can make your online marketing more efficient. The scanned data will also help you to focus on the right priorities to increase sales revenue and improve your SEO. The Diib platform for example lets you benchmark where your site is currently and you can check over a period of time if the actions you have taken have made a difference in your overall website performance. If you are not sure how to go about using online website scanning tools or just don’t have the time to do this yourself it’s easy to reach out to RDM (Robertson Digital Marketing) in London and they can get you started straightaway. The guys at RDM have been working with numerous website audit software platforms. If you want to know more get in touch with RDM or to see how you can get started with your free website audit or as we have recommended above check out what Diib can do for you. So, you're keen to get started writing some engaging content to post on your website or social media channels but wait, there are a few things you need to consider before you start writing. Get yourself organised and make your content mean something to your target audience and make it search friendly. There are a few steps you can make to ensure your content is more effective in creating engagement with your target audience as well as increasing the effectiveness of your website in organic search by making it more SEO friendly.
Topics. Make sure that your topics are going to be engaging, perhaps you get frequent questions from customer and leads. This should guide you on what will be popular topics to focus on that will create interest. Select eye-catching headlines that are relevant to your content along with a 4-line overview. Plan. Create a plan of topics along with a schedule so that you know what tasks are to be completed and when. Some companies post an article or blog every day, some once a week. Monthly is less desirable as you will start to lose the momentum. As a general rule your content will start to have a bigger impact once you exceed 100 articles. Keyword focus. Find a balance of the keywords and phrases to include in your piece of content. Do not stuff your article with keywords, this will make it more difficult to read, you'll lose the flow and it can adversely affect organic search. Use a tool to discover your keywords like Google’s keyword planner. Once you decide on your keywords try to aim for a keyword density in your content of no more than 2%, this will give a good balance of flowing readable content that includes the right number of keywords for organic search. Links. Don’t go crazy adding dozens of links in your content, add just one or two links to relevant landing pages. If you get your content published on a third-party site consider where you want the reader to go. Measurement. One you post your content make sure that there is an option for sharing, likes, comments or other engagement. Once posted you should be measuring the level of engagement over time and use this to plan for future topics so you can focus on the content that will produce the most engagement. If you are not sure how to go about making your content SEO friendly or just don’t have the time to do this yourself it’s easy to reach out to RDM (Robertson Digital Marketing) in London and they can get you started straightaway. The guys at RDM have been working with some of the world’s leading brands guiding their SEO and digital marketing efforts for over three decades. If you want to know more get in touch with RDM or to see how you can get started with your free website audit check out what Diib can do for you. How do you know if your website is performing as desired and that you are maximising your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) opportunities? The first step in understanding where you are is to get an audit of your website status that will help identify next steps and help you formulate a plan of action to achieve your objectives. Whether you're trying to generate leads or build a brand it's key to establish clearly what your website objectives are. An audit can then help to show how you measure up against those objectives and assist in setting key goals going forward. SEO is broadly the impact of your online activities that affect and increase or decrease your organic search results. Increasing organic search is good because you are potentially increasing quality traffic without spending money on advertising. When thinking about SEO it’s important to consider this in two separate aspects, On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.
A lot of work and effort goes into making a website optimized for search and it is therefore prudent to conduct a regular audit using a service like Diib. Run regular audit reports and monitor performance over time against benchmarks set. On-Site and Technical SEO. Technical SEO measurement indicates how HTML elements contribute to your site’s usability and is a reflection of how easy (or not) your site is to crawl and be indexed. These are the things you can fix on your website that impact on how well your website performs in search for example:
Off-Site SEO. This is the measurement of the prevalence of external links back to your site and external site rankings. This is by far the most challenging aspect of any site SEO because this is where you have to do all the work. There are several approaches on how to tackle off-site SEO. You can create quality content and get that content published on sites that have a high domain authority, sites considered as key influencers in a specific area. You can do this by negotiating with a particular influencer site for publication, they will demand high quality content and, on most occasions, will ask for a fee too. If your budget doesn’t stretch to paying influencers you can try posting your content on an article site with a high domain authority. Whatever way you do this the objective is to create quality back links to your site that in turn improves your domain authority and as a result your page ranking and organic search results. If you are not sure how to go about auditing your SEO or just don’t have the time to do this yourself it’s easy to reach out to RDM (Robertson Digital Marketing) in London and they can get you started straightaway. The guys at RDM have been working with some of the world’s leading brands guiding their SEO and digital marketing efforts for over three decades. If you want to know more get in touch with RDM or to see how you can get started with your free website audit check out what Diib can do for you. As the world starts falling into an economic recession thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic now is the perfect time to start generating more online content about your business. Customers are moving their focus online and are consuming more content day by day. The world's economies will start to open up towards the end of 2020 so you need to ensure that your business is best placed to take advantage of this. It’s a terrible situation to be in having to close your business and potentially losing customers but you should be making the most of this downtime by being prepared for everything to open up again towards the end of 2020. Smart companies are now focusing on content creation across their online media. This keeps customers fully engaged and helps to build a larger following on social media meaning you have a larger captive audience as businesses open up again.
This is a positive action you should be taking now, not sitting around worrying about lost sales and mounting costs. Start writing engaging articles and blogs every day so that your brand, products and service remain at the forefront of your audience's mind. Even if you don’t have a blog or article section on your website you can still post articles on Facebook and LinkedIn or other social media platforms. Try and keep your articles interesting an informative without overtly self-promoting your business and as a general rule aim for 500 to 600 words. The exception might be a highly technical article that could run to 1,500 words or higher. People's attention spans are short so a 3 or 4 minute read is perfectly acceptable and more likely to garner engagement. Post daily if possible or at least several times a week to keep the momentum going. Try asking questions or ask for feedback to generate more direct engagement, experiment with different techniques and see which ones give the best engagement. There is an added bonus of adding quality content to your online presence in that your SEO and website rank could improve too making it easier for potential customers to find you. Robertson Digital Marketing (RDM) is your perfect content partner, in fact we like to think of ourselves as the masters of content. We have recently been working with several clients since the lockdown in London to create daily content posts and within 2 months they have seen a jump of 16% in the number of followers. With an experienced team of native English speaker professional writers, we service clients around the world. RDM have some excellent deals on content creation packages that start as low $25 per article and we can start immediately to get your article and blog posts up and running. At RDM we like to keep things really simple so you don’t have to get bogged down in SEO jargon and other marketing techno babble. Just tell us about your business priorities and leave everything else to us. RDM work with partners like Diib to audit and monitor your website traffic so we can report back on the effectiveness of your content and demonstrate real ROI. |
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