Ranking well on search engines such as Google, Safari, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Yahoo is important for Brisbane businesses relying on customers to find them online. This article provides you with tips to improve your business SEO rankings.
Google is the most important engine in Australia with a 94% market share. According to Statista, most Australians search on Google for products and services before buying. If a business does not have an organic ranking on Google they are losing out on sales to competitors.
You are not alone if your website is not working for you. Many small to medium Australian businesses have not invested in search engine optimised (SEO) websites. The good news is that Harmony Digital is expert at renovating websites and building new sites with targeted SEO content that can improve your traffic, leads, and revenue.
Search optimisation is critical to building your market share and increasing sales. Here are Harmony Digital’s top tips to improve your SEO rankings.
1. Analyse Your SEO Rankings to Understand How Customers Behave Online
Improving your business’ search rankings starts with understanding who your customers are, and their search behaviour during the buying cycle. This cycle includes the awareness, consideration, and purchase phases.
Product Awareness Phase – the customer has a problem and starts searching online for solutions using general search terms such as ‘fix my antenna’ or ‘TV repair’.
Product Consideration Phase – the customer better understands the problem and is now refining their search for the best solutions. During this phase, specific locations, product types, and features are added to search descriptions. For example, ‘digital TV antenna repair Brisbane’.
Product Purchase Phase – the customer has happy with their research, is ready to buy, and has a general idea of who to buy from. At this stage, they will search directly using the company name. For example, ‘XYZ Antenna Repairs’.
Having an SEO optimised website increases your chances of being shortlisted in the purchase phase.
2. Use Relevant Keywords And Phrases In Your Website Content
Keywords are words or phrases that a customer uses they are doing a general or specific search. For example, ‘NBN repair’ and ‘best NBN repairs Brisbane’.
SEO works by adding the most popular keywords used by your customers to your website content, headlines, alt tags, and image file names. The key is to use relevant keywords that refer to your business, products, services, or location.
3. Regularly Add New Content to Increase SEO Rankings
Updating your content encourages Google and other search engines to regularly visit your site. This will help with content discovery and search rankings.
Your static website pages need refreshing every six to twelve months while old content should be culled. Increase your Google ranking with new products and services, testimonials, and articles. Image or video-heavy pages also need descriptive content to help them to rank.
4. Include the Meta Description Tag
Meta description tags are important tools that help tell the search engine about a specific page and then to rank this page based on its relevance to the customer’s search criteria. The meta description is a must have if you want to improve SEO rankings of your key web pages.
5. Add Inbound Web Links To Your Website Increase SEO Rankings
External websites and directory listings and social posts linking to your web pages can give your website increased credibility. They also help improve search rank results. Reputable websites earn higher search engine ranking and customer traffic.
You will need to gain permission to have a link added from an external site that points to your site. This is easier to negotiate when your business is held in high regard and your website has a good domain authority.
6. Add Outbound Links to Authoritative Websites
Your website’s credibility and SEO ranking are improved when you verify your claims. You can do this by adding external links to authoritative and trustworthy sources that offer content or data, preferably with a date stamp.
External sources older than five years should be updated where there is newer data or peer reviewed research.
7. Improve Your Website’s Page Loading Speed to Increase SEO Rankings
Slow speeds reduce the number of people willing to wait for the pages to load. Slow load speeds also harm your Google search ranking. According to Google Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, your website should load in less than two to three seconds.
8. Optimised Images Help to Increase SEO Rankings
Website images are important for providing a human connection with your customers and communicating complex ideas. However, images with large file sizes that load slowly damage your SEO ranking.
9. Header Tags Improve Page Readability
Headings are useful for improving the customer’s experience on your website. They allow the eye to scan a page and then read a section in depth where that topic is of interest. Web pages without regular headings and negative space to visually separate different topics can lead to high bounce rates where the customers leave your website. A lack of headings will also affect your search engine ranking too.
Header tags and other HTML coding instructions improve digital accessibility for vision impaired people who use screen readers to access web pages. If a page on your website is not accessible, the content layout will need to be updated or rebuilt to be made compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
10. Optimise Your Website For Mobile Devices
According to Statista, 45% of internet searches in Australia are completed with mobile phones. This is on par with computers and laptops which are used 49% of the time. Google recognises the rising importance of mobiles and will mark down sites that are not desktop, tablet, and mobile compatible.
Harmony Digital uses professional tools such as WordPress to simultaneously build for desktop, tablet, and mobile screen formats. We then optimise the layout and screen size of each page to maximise SEO rankings.
Get More Eyes on Your Best Products and Services
Harmony Digital are expert at renovating or building new SEO optimised websites to get your most profitable products and services in front of valued customers.
Contact Harmony Digital for a free business website review. We deliver marketing solutions that are fit for purpose and help your company reach customers online.
