How Can SEO Help Me Boost My Business?
As most of us know, organic search engine optimisation (or SEO) is one of the most popular and important ways of boosting your business visibility. SEO by definition is;
“a set of rules that should be followed by website or blog owners in order to optimise their websites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings”.
Why is SEO so important?
Due to today’s competitive market SEO has never been more vital in expanding your business and increasing your sales. Great SEO is essential as:
- The majority of people using a search engine are more likely to choose from the top ten suggestions on the first results page. So in order to gain visitors to your website and customers to your business you need to rank as high as possible.
- Good SEO practices also improve the experience and usability of your website.
- People trust search engines so having a presence on the first page raises the opinion of your business.
- Generally, people who find a website by searching in a search engine are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social media channels. So, SEO is also good for socially promoting your business.
- SEO can put you ahead of your competition! Businesses ranked higher by the search engines are visited by more potential customers and potentially making more sales.
We are constantly testing options to see what works best and what is dropping in popularity. To test just how vital proper SEO can be for your business we did an experiment with one of our test sites; Cutting Edge Photography. We decided to focus on the two most important pages of our site; the home page and about page. The website is only a demo site designed as a wedding photography business based in Chertsey Surrey.
The Home Page
Our original home page included:
- Absolutely no text on the home page.
- A browser title that read “Cutting Edge Photography, photographers in Chertsey, Surrey”
- A display title read “Wedding Photographer Chertsey”
- On May 7th the home page displayed approx 52nd in Google search results.
Our main aim when updating the home page was to optimise four specific keywords; “wedding”, “photographer”, “photography” and “Chertsey”. These four keywords encompass the main phrases that a potential customer would search for when looking for our business.
So we updated our browser title to “wedding photographers in Chertsey, Surrey”, altered our meta description to read “Cutting Edge Photography, specialist professional wedding photographers, Chertsey, Surrey” and changed our footer to include the words “wedding photographers”. As you can see our “behind the scenes SEO” now mentions our main keywords several (but not too many!) times.
On the page surface we updated our home page text to include the words “wedding photography” and “Chertsey” which weren’t mentioned at all before. Since making these alterations the home page now positions at number 21 in Google search engines (20th May).
The About Page
Moving to the about page, originally it looked like this:
- The only text on our about page was in Latin! (Lorum Ipsum display text)
- The browser title simply read “about”.
- The display title simply read “about”.
- The page didn’t rank anywhere in the first 200 Google search results.
Much like before we wanted to optimise for the keywords “wedding”, “photography”, “photographer” and “Chertsey”. So, we updated the browser title to “about wedding photography, Chertsey, Surrey” and the display title to “about your Surrey wedding photographer”. This single simple change meant that our page would now be ranked somewhere within Google! We also included meta tags and a meta description to reiterate our keywords to the search engines.
For the public side of the SEO we changed the about text to a few sentences that include the words “wedding photography”, “wedding photographer”, “Chertsey”, “Surrey”, “Cutting Edge Photography” and “bride and groom”. This made a huge difference to our about page SEO ranking – originally we didn’t rank anywhere although the page was indexed by Google but since making these simple alterations we now position at 26!
How Can I Update My SEO?
To start updating your SEO log into theimagefile and go to My Websites > Pages > Edit Web Pages. Click on the page you want to edit e.g. Home, and fill in the fields; Displayed Title and Browser Title. Don’t forget to fill in your meta tags, within the meta tags area you can fill in those all important keywords and add a meta description. Although Google does not use the keywords at all any more – there are still other search engines out there that do!
Find out more SEO tips here!
