Having great website content that engages with your audience and helps to increase conversions is hugely important, but what about what Google wants?
It isn’t easy to find the balance between well written text and adding relevant keywords into the site content in order to improve your search engine optimisation. So where’s the SEO sweet spot? From our years of experience in offering Search engine optimisation services to 100’s of clients, here’s a few do’s and don’ts that we’ve learned along the way…
Don’t add useless content/pages to your website just because you think it might benefit SEO
Search engines are intuitive enough to look for content that it feels will be useful to users depending on the individual search. In addition to this, other factors will be taken into consideration such as the average bounce rate for that landing page and the average amount of time that users are spending on it.
If you’re providing weak content that doesn’t offer any value in order to get organic traffic to your site, this wont work. It may have done in the past, but Google now recognises low quality content for exactly what it is.
Add relevant keywords to each page where they fit, but don’t stuff
Unsurprisingly, Google is very clever! Although including keywords within your text is both beneficial and necessary for SEO, if you over do it, search engines will pick up on this and penalise you for it. Google will search for featured keywords and related items throughout your website, but the pages also must add more than just keyword inclusion.
Don’t duplicate content
Whether that’s across your own website or taking content from someone else’s!
Add original content with value to your potential customers. For example, if your business has multiple bases or locations, having multiple pages for each location can help to improve your localised ranking within those areas, but the content featured on each page needs to be different. It shouldn’t be an exact copy of the text used with just a few words swapped here and there.
When considering your keyword research don’t just look at the number of monthly searches, look at the number of page results
Do some research before including specific words and phrases in both content and other important SEO areas of the page. Look at how many times that specific keyword is being featured across the web, and whether it may be better to focus on increasing your ranking for a similar phrase that your potential customers are more likely to find you for.
This isn’t to say that you should disregard certain keyword phrases just because they have a huge number of page results, but it’s worth taking into considering when undergoing your initial research.
Don’t forget about other optimisation areas of each page
- Header Tags
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Alt Tags
- Image file names
- Redirects
- URL’s
- Internal Links
- Link Volume
You will be able to optimise your website properly by addressing all the above areas on each page in addition to just amending or creating website content filled with relevant keywords.
Lastly, create content that your users are looking for
Think about the services your offering, know the questions that people are asking and exactly what your customer is looking for. Then write content that answers questions, engages users and most importantly is helpful and easy.
As mentioned above, Google also takes into consideration how users react to the content on your site. So yes, it is important to make sure you’re using those relevant keywords where you can, but also focus on helping and understanding your potential customers.
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