And if it is, what are some easy ways to give your online presence a boost?
April is Stress Awareness Month and according to careercast.com research, when asked to rate their job stress out of ten 78% of marketers rated it at seven or higher. So it’s no wonder business owners find it extremely difficult to run their marketing alongside their day-to-day job.
One of the main things business owners are always trying to do is use their marketing to improve their search engine rankings. So what are some easy wins that small to medium business owners can do to maximise their SEO efforts with the least amount of stress? Here are our top three:
1. Replace images on your website
One of the easiest ways to give your SEO a boost is to do some small updates on your website and replacing images is a good place to start. We recommend doing this every six months to make sure your images are up to date and to give Google a nudge to rearrange your site’s ranking.
Although stock imagery is okay to use, adding authentic images of your own work or staff is best. If you don’t have any photos of your own, give us a call on 01903 686858 to speak to our team about how we can help.
Top tip: On top of replacing the images on your site, make sure that the new images you add have ALT text. Search engines can’t see images so using ALT text describing the image is the only way to get that image ranked. Adding new images without ALT text will flag up as an update, but adding ALT text will also allow the search engines to understand what your image is and show it in relevant search results.
2. Make sure you’re using the right title tags
While websites need to be created to be helpful to your target consumer, it’s also important to make sure search engines can read your website too. We’re certainly not saying to ‘keyword stuff’ or use other black hat SEO tactics, but what we are saying is to make sure your website is formatted correctly.
The main thing to do is use Headings properly (known as H1’s, H2’s and H3’s) in the right way. These are the three main types of title tags. Although there are more, generally speaking, you’ll only ever need the first three:
H1 – A title and the biggest of the title tags
H2 – A smaller heading used to title subsections
H3 – An even smaller heading usually used for subheadings
Why are title tags important for SEO?
Title tags are crucial for SEO as they allow search engines to understand what content is the most important. Which, in turn, enables it to understand what the webpage is about. Since Google’s new algorithm update, it is focusing more on producing helpful results to users.
Making sure that your website uses title tags correctly will help Google place your website in relevant search results. So setting aside some time to go through your website and making sure that all the right headings have the right tags could really boost your website up the search rankings.
Top tip: Where you can, make sure that your H1’s include a focus keyword.
3. Update and republish old blog posts
There’s a lot of pressure now to always be creating new and unique content but when it comes to SEO, this isn’t essential. In fact, re-using old content can be just as effective if you spend just a small amount of time ‘top and tailing’ it.
What is top and tailing?
Top and tailing simply means to write (or re-write) the start and end of a piece of written content. In this context, it means to give it a refresh and potentially make it more current. In other circumstances, you may ‘top and tail’ a piece of writing to make it more effective:
- The ‘Top’ is the engaging start of a piece of written content – something that draws the reader in and makes them want to read more
- The ‘Tai’l is the instructive end – telling the reader what they need to do next
Top and tailing an old piece of content will take less time than writing a whole new piece of content and it can still be used as if it’s new. So, by all means, republish it as a new blog post and talk about it through your marketing channels. If you feel it’s appropriate, you can explicitly say that the ‘new’ article is an updated version of a previous article. Just like we did with our networking blog post.
If you’re finding that you just don’t have the time to try these quick wins, it might be time to ask for some help with your marketing. Which is where we come in! Give our marketing experts a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk to find out how we can help.