Today we are going to be diving deep into the importance of search engine marketing and how you can become an SEO expert. HC Media Group aims to improve your SEO knowledge & broaden your SEO skills so you can implement them on your website. HC Media Group is an award-winning marketing agency with expert knowledge that will help you get your website ranking on Google.
There are multiple ranking factors that are taken into consideration when getting your website ranking against your competitors. Search Engine Optimisation is all about getting your website found in search engines whilst ranking for relevant phrases associated with your business and the services/products you provide.
It can be difficult to rank for short, broad target keywords as they generate so many search results. This means that you want to rank for very specific keywords so there is a smaller volume of results, here are our SEO tips from SEO experts to get your website ranking.
So, let’s say you sell doughnuts in Liverpool, and you specialise in gluten-free products. Instead of trying to get your piece of content to rank for ‘doughnut shops’, you will try to rank for ‘gluten-free doughnuts Liverpool’. This gives your keyword ‘doughnuts’ a speciality of ‘gluten-free’ and a location of ‘Liverpool’. This is great as the traffic your website gets will be targeted, so you provide the exact product that the customer is looking for and therefore increase your conversion rate. Using keyword phrases like these also benefits your business as you are fighting against a smaller amount of specific competition that are closely related to your product.
Use Specific and Relevant Titles Within Your Content
The titles and descriptions of each page or blog post on your site are scrutinised by both Google and potential customers. This is what is shown on the organic search results page – these determine whether your site gets a click or a miss from organic traffic. If we go back to the doughnut shop example you want the title of each page to be directly related to the content that the page holds. If you have a page SEO optimised for ‘vegan doughnuts’, you want the page title to have both the keyword and location – so this will appear as ‘vegan doughnuts Liverpool’, amplifying the user experience.
You follow a very similar principle for the meta description, this appears below the title on the search engine results page and provides a brief description of the page itself and the product/service for content marketing, so it appears in search queries.
For example, your meta description could be a featured snippet along the lines of ‘Yummy Doughnuts Ltd make fresh vegan doughnuts in their Liverpool store using the best quality ingredients to leave their customers coming back for more. This is a great meta description for your SEO strategy, as it includes the keyword ‘doughnuts’, the location ‘Liverpool’, and the name of the company ‘Yummy Doughnuts Ltd’ – each of which will appeal to Google’s Search Console.
Create a Clear Site Map
As SEO experts we know how the SEO of your site should begin before you even have a website to optimise. Start by creating a comprehensive plan of your site map and all the pages that you want for your site. It is crucial for SEO that your website is one page, one service.
This means that every different product/service on your website should have its own individual page. So, for Yummy Doughnuts Ltd website their site map would have individual pages for each product such as ‘vegan doughnuts’, ‘gluten-free doughnuts’, and ‘filled doughnuts’.
Each of these pages should then be linked back to the homepage – internal link building enables Google’s crawling bots to index the site at a quicker pace, ultimately, therefore, improving the SEO of the site. The use of Google Analytics enables you to see what is working best, you can then adapt your strategy accordingly.
Become an SEO Expert in Keyword Research
SEO (search engine optimisation) keywords are the words and phrases that you use in your content for customers to find your website through a search engine. The words you use should be relevant to the page content and be used frequently. When looking for what keywords to choose you should look at the search volume of each key term that is related to your products/service – but is it better to have a single word or a phrase?
As future SEO experts, you need to know that there are a lot of benefits to using phrases as keywords, especially when your business has a large amount of competition. For example, let’s say you sell gin in Manchester. When choosing your keywords, you want to look at including 3 factors – speciality, product, and location.
So, for this specific company, their speciality is personalised bottles, their product is gin, and it is made and sold in Manchester. This means that the most effective keywords for them would be a phrase, in this case, ‘personalised gin bottles Manchester’. For an industry that is so large, the search terms need to be refined to exactly what the company provides.
This means that it will be easier to rank on Google as there is less competition for that specific search term. It also means that the traffic received to the website is targeted to the exact product, so you already have customers in the buying process and the sales funnel – this means a higher conversion rate.
This process works exactly the same for companies who provide a service, rather than sell a product. For this example, we will take a party entertainment company in Leeds. As there is a large amount of competition in this industry and competition keywords, you have to be more selective to gain the most traffic. Once again we want to focus on the 3 main elements – service, specialty, and location. For the purpose of the example, let’s say the company specialises in fire-breathing acts. So, the best keyword search phrase they could use would be ‘fire breathing party acts Leeds’.
If you break that down you have the specialty‘ fire breathing’, the service ‘party acts’, and the location ‘Leeds’. This search phrase is going to bring a higher amount of targeted, less competitive traffic, and therefore a higher conversion rate. If this company were to choose a single keyword such as ‘entertainment’ or a less specific phrase like ‘party entertainment’, then they would be competing nationally, as opposed to gaining local, better-quality traffic.
Google Keyword Planner is a great, free keyword research tool to get you started. When searching your terms, Google Keyword Planner will pull up a list of keywords, including long-tail keywords, along with their monthly search volumes. You can then decide from that list which particular keywords will work best for your website.
The best way to look at keyword phrases is to zoom into each detail of your business. Don’t look at your company as a whole, find what makes your business unique – as this is your place to best advertise within the market.
How the SEO Experts at HC Media Group Can Help
Here at HC Media Group, we help many businesses with their keyword choices and how these can help your website rank higher. We have the best software and the best team of SEO Experts to research the ideal keywords that will maximise your traffic and make your mark on Google within the industry. Get in touch with us today to bring us into your business and start this journey with you.
