If you’re planning to optimise your website in order to improve your conversion rate, being SEO savvy is a great way to start.
This technique will make you more discoverable, improving your brand awareness and attracting more potential customers.
Helping your brand to feature high up in the Google search results can make all the difference – after all, the first five organic search results receive a huge 67.6% of all clicks. It will also help you to appear trustworthy and offer you a greater sense of authority.
So – how to optimise a website effectively? The specialists at Trustist have the answers.
Undertaking keyword research
A keyword is a search term that is regularly entered into Google or any other engine by users seeking out products and services that are the same as – or similar to – your own.
Including the right keywords in your copy will mean that more relevant audience members browsing the internet will come across your content.
You should organically include both short and long-tail keywords in order to ensure that your site receives relevant traffic. They can help to attract local audiences or to specify the exact products and services that you offer.
For example, if you sell plant-based baked goods, simply using keywords such as “cakes” may not bring in quite the right crowd. Including “vegan-friendly chocolate cake” is more likely to see visitors convert to customers.
Performing on-page SEO
This leads directly on from our previous point. To really boost your page’s performance, you need to know where exactly to place your keywords. Some of the smartest places to include them are meta descriptions, titles and H1 tags as well as the alt text for images.
Alt text should also be descriptive, as should your page URLs. Keep them short for extra effect.
You should also look at the format of your content. Perform an online search using the main keyword in your piece and see what kinds of pages rank the highest. Are they list posts? Buyers’ guides? How-to blog posts? Tailor your content to reflect this.
Within your content, make sure that you don’t hammer home exact matching keywords over and over again, but try to include alternatives and semantically related words and phrases.
This will ensure “topical relevance”, helping Google to “understand” exactly what the page is about and rank it correctly.
Finally, be sure to include high-quality calls to action. These are proven to increase the number of conversions a site experiences.
Acquiring great backlinks
To achieve peak discoverability, you shouldn’t just focus on your own specific pages. Your details needs to be spread as far as possible across relevant parts of the web, attracting potential customers from all possible sources.
To do this, you should work on building relationships with journalists, bloggers, influencers and other notable names within your industry. All the professionals that you engage with should produce relevant high-quality online content.
You can then arrange for them to review a product of yours, quote you in an article or feature a guest post that you have created with their followers. These items should always include a direct link back to your web page or profile.
You should also create original, interesting content that users will want to share with one another on social media. This will set you up as an expert in your field – building trust – as well as getting your name known and your links spread far and wide.
Interesting original studies, infographics and visual or interactive content are great examples of popular pieces that are likely to be shared.
Adding positive comments or reviews to others’ content is also a great way to link build. You may be able to include a link to your own page in the comment itself, or you can just use it as a way to reach out and make a connection with the author, who may then link to you later.
Ensuring your page speed is as fast as possible
Don’t count on your potential customers having endless patience. People are more likely to abandon your site without converting if your content takes a long time to load. Use Google Page Speed Insights to find out your current page speed, then improve it.
You can do this by optimising and simplifying your site’s code, allowing compression, setting a shorter time limit on your cache, avoiding too much use of blocking JavaScript, optimising your images and improving the response time of your site’s server.
Adding schema markup
Including a schema markup is another way of helping Google to decode the purpose of your site and ensure that it prioritises its most vital information.
You can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to directly inform the search engine of the purpose and themes of your pages. You can then input a variety of tags and connect them to different parts of your content to give a precise rundown of what everything does.
The Helper can then generate new HTML code which includes the markup and can be added directly to your site. This will help Google to rank your content for relevant searches, making conversions much more likely.
In conclusion, to SEO optimise your website, the key steps are to organically include relevant keywords, ensure that all on-page elements are optimised, actively link-build, improve your page speed and include schema markup.
To get started, check how your page is currently performing when you search for popular keywords, then start planning how to improve your ranking. Being SEO savvy in the ways mentioned above may see your conversions gradually and significantly improve.