Women starting their own businesses have a vested interest in improving their SEO ranking and as a result, their bottom line.
The majority of traffic that arrives at any website will be via search engines like Google. So it’s essential for any business website to appear as highly as possible in the search results of the top search engines if they are to be seen by potential customers.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a discipline used by many digital marketing agencies to increase the organic search ranking of a website. These tactics are designed to optimise the web presence of a business to meet certain criteria as set out by search engine indexing algorithms.
The following are some useful tips female entrepreneurs can utilise to help increase their SEO score.
Research and incorporate keywords
Keywords are the bread and butter of any SEO campaign as they are the primary signals by which search engines categorise web content. The keywords you target should reflect the search terms your target audience is using to find the products and or services that you offer.
You can use Google’s keyword planner to find the top keywords for your industry and create a keyword strategy that you can incorporate throughout your website’s content. You should use the keywords in the headings and subheadings of your pages as well as spreading them out naturally throughout blocks of text.
While keywords are useful, they can backfire on you if you over-optimise or ‘keyword stuff’ content in the hopes of inflating its relevancy. You need to be aware of keywords and use them strategically without going overboard and creating content that’s riddled with them purely for the sake of SEO.
Big search engines like Google actively punish domains that are guilty of keyword stuffing as they view this kind of content as low-value for users. When preparing a piece of content, it’s useful to ask yourself “what value does this have to my audience?” If it has no real value to a real person, then it won’t help your SEO ranking.
Get technically optimised
You may have a great looking website with lots of persuasive, keyword optimised sales copy, but it won’t count for much if it performs horribly from a technical standpoint. One of the most common issues is when your website has too many cumbersome graphics, images and videos clogging it up and slowing down the loading speed for users.
You need to make sure that you website loads quickly and provides authoritative answers to the user’s search query. Research has shown that people are far more likely to leave or ‘bounce’ from your website if it doesn’t fully load within a few seconds or if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for.
Another important technical factor is mobile friendly optimisation, which basically means making sure your website displays dynamically across mobile and tablet devices. As of 2015, Google began to rank mobile friendly websites above those that weren’t.
It’s now absolutely essential to have a mobile friendly website as the majority of product searches and now being performed on smartphones. Nowadays, the mobile version of a website is considered the primary vehicle for generating and converting new leads.
Develop and maintain a high quality, engaging blog
Maintaining a regularly updated company blog is one of the best ways to show search engines that your domain is putting out informative and engaging content. It shows that your business is an authoritative voice within the industry and is actively engaged in current events.
Blogs also, obviously, attract readers to your website who will then be exposed to your marketing material and may end up making a purchase. Even if people only read your blog and then leave the site, they will have a better impression of your brand and will be easier to convert in the future.
Plenty of businesses have a blog, but a majority of them are very thin on content and aren’t updated regularly. You need to update your blog routinely with high quality and in-depth content; otherwise it won’t give you any positive SEO points.
Remember that search engines want to provide the best results for their users; so the longer and more detailed your content is, the better you SEO score will be.
While we have barely scratched the surface of how to perform effective SEO, the above tips will give women starting their businesses a great head start in the right direction. Those who are seeking a more comprehensive approach should consider buying consultancy from a professional SEO firm.