How to do SEO for a new website

SEO, otherwise known as search engine optimisation, is an essential aspect of digital marketing. In short, SEO techniques involve optimising a website in terms of its design, functionality and content to improve its chances of earning a top spot in the search engine rankings. This is important because it makes a company’s site more visible, helping to generate more organic traffic. However, getting traffic to your website is one thing, but this does not automatically result in more sales and improved profit levels. As such, traffic alone is not an effective measure of the success of an SEO campaign. You also need to consider your conversion rate, i.e. the number of people that complete an action. Read on to discover some key SEO techniques you can use on your new website that won't just improve traffic but which will have a positive impact on your conversion rates.

Optimise your content

Great content is at the heart of good SEO. Populating your product, services and other web pages with insightful content that utilises strategic keywords your customers are searching for is vital to getting found in the results pages. One tip that you can follow in order to increase your conversion rate is to target more descriptive long tail keywords. This is important because a greater emphasis is being placed on semantic searches today, as search engines are becoming more and more complex and customers want to improve their chances of returning the most accurate results. Long tail keywords can be especially beneficial for smaller businesses that have difficulty ranking for basic search terms that may get a lot of competition from across the web. Don't forget to include a call to action on each page and link to other pages on your site to provide customers with a clear path to follow - whether it's making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter.

Start a blog

Adding a blog is a must when it comes to SEO for a new website. There are many benefits that are associated with having a blog. Firstly, it provides you with an area to provide advice and commentary on your products and on matters relating to the industry. This is a great way to position yourself as an expert in your field. By sharing your industry knowledge with customers, you are effectively showing them why they should choose your company. It is also an indirect and non-intrusive marketing form, which is why it is so effective. It gives you a great opportunity to incorporate more keywords naturally into your website and to update your content regularly with insightful advice and information so that you have a greater chance of climbing your way up the SERPs. What's more, you can link to other reputable websites, creating a good link building strategy.

Put a method in place for dealing with out of stock product pages

If you have an ecommerce website, you need to have a process for dealing with out of stock product pages. This can kill your conversion rate, so what should you do? There are a number of different options. You could enable the customer to purchase the item and give them a delivery date of when the product will be back in stock. You could take the customer’s email address and send them a notification when the item is back in-store. You could even incorporate some sort of countdown clock or announcement feature that indicates when the product will be available. Any of these options are better than attempting to add the product to your basket and discovering it is not available.

Increase the load speed of your pages

Another crucial aspect of optimising your website is to discover how long it takes for your site to load. No one wants to deal with a website that takes forever to load. Anything over three seconds can seem like minutes for customers that are using the Internet to conveniently locate products and services. After all, that is what the Internet is all about: convenience. So, if you take this away, a visitor is going to be much more likely to bounce and head to a competitor’s website instead.

Responsive web design

Smartphones have taken off massively over the past few years with around 36% of the world's population owning one. In turn, mobile browsing has overtaken desktop browsing, which means you need to adapt your SEO strategy to suit mobile devices. How? Firstly, you need to ensure that your website is mobile friendly at a minimum but ideally mobile responsive, so that it adjusts to the size and dimensions of mobile devices. Secondly, you need to realise that SEO is very different when catering to the mobile form. There are lots of things you need to consider. For starters, use smaller page titles and headings, and break up your content with shorter paragraphs resulting in greater use of white space so that readers aren't bombarded with a screen full of text.

Make your URL structure crawlable

Finally, it is important to pay attention to the structure of your website’s URL. Using keywords in URL slugs makes a massive difference because it means that search engines will find it much easier to crawl your website and identify what it is that you are providing. Plus, you should also consider adding an SSL certificate to your site which will appear in the address bar as https:// and will act as a sign to both search engines and your customers that you are a safe and secure company. If you follow the SEO tips that have been provided above, you should be able to get your SEO campaign for your new website up and running successfully. Remember, while website traffic is good, sales are better. When putting together an effective search engine optimisation strategy, you need to make sure you focus on approaches that are ultimately going to have a positive effect on your bottom line. To find out more from the SEO experts, get in touch with us today.