2021 saw a huge shift in a lot of things in life, including the digital landscape and the demand for SEO Belfast grew dramatically, at least for our agency it did.. With the closing of bricks and mortar businesses, there was a huge shift in businesses hoping to get online so that they could continue their businesses. We saw a lot of these businesses coming to us, be it for a website, SEO to increase their ranking on Google or just general advice – which we are always happy to give.
There is so much information out there that is too hard to implement, so we wanted to be different. We want to help people in the understanding of SEO and putting basic things into place to accelerate their businesses. When it all becomes too much work and your business is thriving, come to us, or come to us at the start. All we want to do is help your business be seen and be the very best that it can be.
These are our top tips and they are actionable today – so get started.
In an oversaturated market where everyone is trying to be seen, as well as constant changes in the list of demands that Google has in order to give you the holy grail place on page one.
UX – User Experience
There were updates in June to the algorithm and the focus was on UX, measured through their Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are page experience signals and they are looking for responsiveness ad how interactive your site is alongside loading speed and stability.
Google, above all else, cares about users having a great experience and therefore they rank based on this.
Linking Internally
We have previously touched on different elements of internal linking such as:
Read More: Top 10 internal linking mistakes to avoid
Linking internally is so important to ensure that your content isn’t getting missed. It is a huge and very simple way to do well in SEO – allowing traffic to be more evenly distributed.
There is a wealth of data available that highlights the success that many businesses have had when deploying a good internal linking strategy.
If there is nowhere that a link fits in your text, you can simply use the ‘related article’ that you always see on pages as you are browsing. It is nice for humans searching for information and extremely helpful for Google to understand what you are talking about.
Blog Post Should Also Be Video
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and is owned by Google. If you are to convert your blog posts into videos, not only are you getting an extra piece of content in a different version, but you have much more chance at reaching a larger customer base.
Video is responsible for huge rises in organic traffic, but differs to traditional SEO in that it ranks you based on 24h performance and exposure, whereas with Google, you can appear at any time regardless of the age of a piece.
Update Your Old Content
When you have users coming onto your site, you want information that is relevant to the user and so does Google. If you think that articles written a while ago hold no value then you would be wrong, that content, for the most part, is relevant.
So go back and update anything that you can to be more relevant today and you will see that the page on your data trackers such as Google Analytics shows more traffic. Even simply updating old images can help to give a content piece a new lease of life.
Run tests on your content in SEMrush and highlight the page gaps that are there, it is likely that you will find your content is missing out on really easy keywords or what we like to call ‘low hanging fruit’.
Learn More About Our SEO Belfast Services
Optimise Content For Voice
Search engines have their very own language that they communicate in. If you optimise your content for schema-mark up then you will be able to be discovered in a shorter space of time.
To do this, you are going to need to be looking for the long tail keywords that people naturally speak, such as ‘Who is the best SEO company in Belfast?’ – that’s us.
Get Traffic With Long Tail Keywords
Your top and chosen keywords are often highly competitive, targeting the long tail keywords surrounding your business keywords is a great way to start ranking for related, yet less competitive terms.
When you use variations, you gain authority for the main key word by association.
Example: ‘gardening gloves’ is your main keyword, try going after ‘pretty gardening gloves’
Google are not playing hard to get here, they actually show you this information when you search anything, next time you search for something, have a look at the bottom and there will be a box with the title “People also Ask”.
Find Out The Intention
When a user is searching for something, they are looking for information or trying to buy something, but there are other categories. User search intent can be broken down into the following categories:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Commercial
- Transactional
This information might not seem very useful, but if you take this information and see what search type the majority of your audience is carrying out then you will be able to tailor your content to that type of content and help your audience find what they are looking for.
For example if users are defined as being informational for the most part, then you would do well in writing a ‘How TO…’ blog piece.
On Page – The Technical Side
To put this quite simply, if you are not doing the right things in your technical on page SEO efforts, then the rest really doesn’t matter as this is the part that needs to be corrected in order for your site to benefit off any of the other processes.
Tips For Monitoring Your On Page Efforts:
- Page Speed Insights to ensure you are compliant with Core Web Vitals and are not experiencing any technical issues with your site.
- Keyword used title and your slug (keep your slug short)
- Internal linking is a must\Image optimisation (you can read more in our Image Optimisation for SEO blog)
- Write content that is focused on the used first and then the search engines
Audits of Your Site and Content
Get into the habit of running a site audit to see if there are any issues there, the audit will highlight issues to you such as broken links and missing images, redirects and much more.
This might not seem important in the short term, but in the long term, these issues can build up and cause serious issues on your site. In turn this can affect your rankings in a big way as well.
Moving onto content gap’s, running audits on your content and that of your competitors will allow you to find keywords that you are not ranking for but they are. These can give you fresh new ideas for content as well get you ranking for the terms that you are missing out on.
SEO is a somewhat daunting process at times and even more so frustrating, the results are not immediate and therefore you have to wait a few days to see if what you have done has had the right impact on your site.
As we said at the beginning, even if you are simply looking for advice, we are more than happy to assist you and get your business seen.