SEO For Beginners
Are you looking to boost your website’s page ranking on Google? Are you a small business looking to do so without breaking the bank? Look no further, Helm & Stern Branding is here to help with the following starter tips and tricks:
What is SEO
SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization,” is the term used to describe the website best-practices that are “search engine” friendly.
A good way to judge if you have an SEO – rich website or page, is to see where that page is ranking on Google. If it is on the first page (top-ten listed webpages) for a broad search (like “bicycles in California”) it is probably doing just fine. If that subject is niche, for example, (like “blue bicycle wheels with sparkles for teens who mountain bike in California”) and you are still ranking top-ten, it could be that there just isn’t a lot of content on Google for your page to stack up against.
If it is a broad search, and if you are not ranking, it is important that you have an understanding as to why you aren’t ranking before you go about making changes. An easy way to do this is to set up Google Search Console. Essentially, you just need a gmail account to set this up, and then you just need to prove you own your website domain. Google Search Console provides a thorough breakdown of your website’s overall performance, as well as specific page performances, and any issues that may be occurring with your pages. If one of your pages does have an issue, Google Search Console will clearly identify it, and point you in the direction to fix it.
Benefits of Key Word Research
If you are unfamiliar with key word research, you might as well be completely clueless when it comes to SEO (just goes to show how closely they go hand-in-hand).
Key words and keyword phrases are popular words and searches. For example, if you have a company that sells eyeshadow, the most popular keywords would be “eye,” “shadow,” “makeup,” just to name a few (and there are hundreds). Examples of keyword phrases would be “eyeshadow colors for brown eyes” or “how to apply eyeshadow”.
There are many ways to discover what keywords and keyword phrases your company should target. For one, if you go into Google, and type “eyeshadow for,” everything that auto-populates the search bar would be considered keywords or keyword phrases. For example, if “eyeshadow for blue eyes” auto-populates after you just type “eyeshadow for”, you can assume “blue eyes” is a popular keyword phrase, as well as “blue” being a popular key word, and “eyeshadow for blue eyes” being another popular keyword phrase. In essence, any search suggested by Google is high traffic, and is worth having content for.
There are other ways to discover keywords and keyword phrases you should be targeting. Another way to do this is to see which keywords and keyword phrases your competitors are targeting. This can as easy as seeing the topics (and sub-topics) of their blog posts. Another way is through Google Search Console, as it provides insight into the top searches that people are searching for when they arrive to your page. Lastly, there are software applications that exist specifically to help highlight target keywords, like Merchant Words.
Run Frequent Speed Tests
If your website has a lot of content, it may be slow to load. Did you know that webpages with slow loading times are also prone to high bounce rates? This is essentially when a customer goes onto your website, and then, due to different reasons (including a slow page load time), ‘bounces’ or leaves. A good way to gauge if your website is slow to load is to use the Lighthouse Chrome extension. If your page is particularly slow, this extension will indicate the reasons as to why it is not loading fast enough. Sometimes, a quick fix is to simply have more pages with less content (instead of trying to fit large amounts of content on one page).
Another great way for you to improve the speed of your webpage is to make all images, logos, and graphics ‘smaller’. Simply take the image, and upload it to tiny.png – don’t worry, this won’t affect the image quality or the actual size, it will just make it faster to load!
As always, Helm & Stern is here to help with all your business needs. If the content of this article sparked your interest and if you’d like to learn more, feel free to connect via our ‘Contact’ form!