A great way to drive more traffic to your website is through Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. This essentially means optimising your site, so it becomes more discoverable through search engines.
Updating your site to boost SEO can feel like a long and daunting process, which is why a few simple tips have been listed below. These can almost guarantee an increase in organic traffic, that is, visitors who find your website through search engines. It also means that you’re not just reliant on one medium, e.g Instagram, for users to discover your website.
Conduct keyword research
This is a vital step towards driving more organic traffic to your website. Once you’ve brainstormed a few topics related to your brand, use tools such as Google Trends and Answer The Public. These will help identify what people are currently searching for that’s similar to what your business or products are about, so you can tailor your site accordingly.
It’s also useful to consider long-tail keywords. These are longer, more specific keywords, ideal for websites that don’t have many visitors yet. So, rather than searching ‘cupcake shops,’ where bigger websites are likely to appear, users might search for ‘cupcake shops in Cornwall,’ where there is likely to be less competition, making it easier to stand out. Hence, it’s additionally a good idea to add your location. For example, Cabin Solutions states, “container conversion, accommodation units & cabin containers north east” on their site.
Add alt text to images
When uploading images to your website, don’t forget to add alt text. If you use WordPress, this can be found in your media library once an image has loaded. For the alt text, describe what your image is, in a few words. For instance, ‘Christmas tree with colourful lights.’ This will provide better descriptions to search engine crawlers, allowing them to properly index an image. Hence, this will enable your website to be placed among the image search results.
Optimise images
Ensure your website loads fast enough by optimising images. If it takes ages to load, even with fast wifi, it can negatively impact your SEO rankings. It can also mean that those who do find your site might get frustrated waiting for it to load and end up going elsewhere. Photoshop is a great tool to use for optimizing images, where you’ll need to reduce the file size while maintaining its overall quality. Take a look at this handy guide to help you do this.
Concluding Thoughts
We hope you have learned a few simple methods that you can use to boost your website’s SEO ranking without any complex processes involved.