2 minute read
BUSINESS CLINIC
Peaky Digital SEO manager, Jamie Mackenzie, offers some tips on how to get your business seen.
THE SEARCH IS ON...
For businesses wanting to engage new audiences and grow their exposure, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) remains one of the most cost-effective ways to do it, an increasingly prescient point as the cost of living continues to rise and many businesses begin to feel the pinch.
Searching on Google has become such an ingrained habit in people’s daily lives that having a hard-to-find website is the digital marketing equivalent of leaving money on the table, one that more often than not can be straightforward to fix.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to help give your site a boost in organic visibility.
More content doesn’t mean more site traffic, better content does It’s all about touchpoints
At its heart SEO shares a lot with other forms of advertising or marketing: where you are seen is almost as important as what you are saying, so you need to make sure you appear wherever your customers are browsing.
If you get a lot of foot traffic, you’ll want to make sure that your business shows up when people include words like “near me” or mention a location in their search, in which case you’ll want to make sure you have a Google Business Profile listing. If most of your sales or leads are generated online, make sure the pages you want people to see are as helpful and easy to use as possible.
Writing blogs alone doesn’t guarantee your site will get more traffic; if you’re not writing content about topics that people are looking for, then it’s unlikely people will find it. Think about mobile users Thinking about who your audience is and what they’re likely to be searching for is the first step to creating content that generates traffic. For inspiration on topics, think: what insights can you give that no one else can? What questions are you asked by clients or customers that others might be searching for? These days most web users browse on a mobile device - that took a slight dip during the pandemic when everyone was working from home and using work laptops, but the rise of mobile internet browsing shows little sign of stopping any time soon. site looks and reacts on a mobile device makes a big difference to how your site is going to be ranked by search engines.
If you usually view your business’s website on a work computer, try spot checking some pages on your smartphone to see how they look and if you run into any formatting or usability issues.
Be realistic with your expectations
SEO isn’t a silver bullet, it can take a little while before you see results and it works best when it runs in tandem with other marketing efforts (for example email and social media campaigns or PPC).
There is a degree of managing expectations when it comes to what search terms you’re going to appear for; if your business sells books online, you’re going to have difficulty outranking Amazon and Waterstones for the term “buy books online”, but you might for “book shop near me” if you have a Google Business Profile listing, or “Jane Austen alternatives” if you’ve created a blog on recommended reads for people that enjoy Jane Austen.
