How to increase SEO for your business

Search engine optimisation (SEO), it’s a term most businesses know and recognise as an acronym for search engine optimisation. They commonly want to know how to increase SEO but don’t know how to go about it. When it comes to optimising your business website so that it gets found when people search there are two approaches you can take:

• Pay to advertise on particular keyword search terms
• Implement a strategy that will help you get found organically for those same keyword search terms.

Both are perfectly acceptable approaches to attracting more traffic to your website. There are really clever ways that you can use both tactics together to enhance your results. Our recommendation is that you have a good organic SEO strategy in place + good lead capture before investing in paid advertising.

HINT: Don’t get sucked into thinking that investing in paid search (EG Adwords) will increase your organic ranking. Search engines hang their hat on not giving paid search advertisers preferential treatment over businesses that don’t pay for search listings. HOWEVER the increased traffic to your site from paid search can help to give you a boost in organic rankings because more traffic = more popular in the eyes of search engines.

Your website is the home of your business online.

Social media is your rented space.

Any content that you create for either space is the furniture.

When you create high quality, unique content for your website your authority improves both with humans and search engines. In effect you’re buying the furniture.

Paying to advertise on specific keywords, ensure’s that you’ll get found BUT it’s like decorating your home with rented furniture. As soon as you stop paying the bill the furniture (or authority) will disappear.

Three ways to improve SEO without paying for your search listing

1. Start blogging

Blog regularly and blog about the problems that you solve for your clients.

Recently we had a client tell us that a consultant had told him that ‘blogging is dead’ so he didn’t include one his new website. I didn’t quite know what to say but expressed how much I disagreed.

Starting out with some keyword research is the best place to start for developing a content plan for your website and social media channels.

Writing content for your business website enables you to build authority, both with search engines AND actual people PLUS it enables you to sell your service without actually having to sell it. A well thought out content plan creates trust in a way where your audience views you as their ‘go to’ resource.

It’s a long term strategy but one that will serve you well in increasing your website’s organic SEO.

Not sure where to start with blogging for your business? Get in contact about a one on one session.

2. Promote your posts

I know the feeling, you’ve written something useful but you feel a bit shy about sharing it with the world.

In reality getting more eyeballs on your website is step number two of how to increase SEO for your business website.

For every new blog post that you write you should also have a promotion plan. Shortly after publishing you’re going to want to share it across your social media channels.

If you’ve got social sharing buttons on your website that’s easy, you can dive right in and do that straight away. If you’ve got scheduling software in place then you can set up a series of shares to twitter.

I recommend sharing it natively to your Facebook page (ie going to Facebook and creating a new post with a link), chances are this is where some of your most engaged ‘fans’ are so give them some relevant, interesting commentary around the post. At the same time schedule post for 1 month, 3 months and 6 months’ time. High fives for all that organisation.

Provided that you have your Facebook tracking pixel installed blog post shares to Facebook are great posts to boost to a wider audience.

Over time, more traffic from social media to each individual blog post will help to improve your organic search ranking for the keyword you’ve optimised for.

3. Create quality links to and from your website.

Inbound and outbound links are an important ingredient of the how to increase SEO recipe. Outbound links you can easily generate for yourself by linking to relevant pieces of content both on your website and on other business websites.

Inbound links can be more difficult to come by.

Inbound links can also be dangerous when obtained through ‘black hat’ tactics and can cause your website to be penalised by search engines. You don’t want your website sent to cyber no man’s land for a period of purgatory while you try and re-establish the good juju you had worked so hard to build.

The moral of the story here is…if someone calls you or emails you offering to put you on the first page of the Google. Say no politely and hang up the phone. No reputable provider of SEO magic (that doesn’t include paid advertising) can guarantee they’ll achieve this for you.

If you are someone that enjoys writing then approaching relevant media outlets or prominent influencers about writing for them is a great strategy. This provides you with a quality inbound link to your website and it exposes you to their audience.

Links from the websites of any associations, directories or groups that you might belong to are high quality links. When you’re weighing up whether or not it’s worth paying those few hundred dollars for membership again next year, factor in the value of any links to your website that are included in your membership.

Do you have friends with businesses that are complementary to yours? Providing a resources or trusted partners page on each of your websites enables you to link to each other’s website in a useful and genuine way.

Following these steps will help increase SEO on your website.

If you’re brand new in business then you probably don’t have much in the way of written content but if you have been blogging for a while then going back and optimising what you already have also help to increase how often your found in organic search results.

Need a hand putting together an SEO plan for your business or optimising your existing website content? This is something that we can help you with. Custom SEO plans start from $249+GST or we can provide you with a quote for optimising your content for you. Send us an email to start a conversation about how we can help improve the organic SEO for your business website.